It’s Labor Day weekend, which means that by now nearly every school district in the country has resumed classes. This marks my first-ever Labor Day weekend where I wasn’t preparing to go back to school either as a student or as a teacher. That’s somewhat humbling, if also a bit mundane (so much so, in fact, that I didn’t realize the significance of it until I was racking my brain to figure out a newsletter topic for this week). I thought I’d take a step back and reflect on my experience teaching as a whole, compare that with my own academic experience, and think a bit about what should change in schools to make them more palatable for teachers.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: My teaching experience was rough. If you’re new here, I encourage you to go back and read some of my earlier newsletters that detail some of the things I was dealing with as a new teacher. To refresh: I began teaching during September of 2021, just a few months after graduating college. I had no prior education experience, my degrees were not in education, and I had no teaching license. I was hired about two weeks before school was back in session and spent most of that time learning various bits of grading and reporting software, as well as the bell schedule, room assignments, my colleagues’ names, and how to use the printer. I had little time to think, which was good because thinking too much is a good way to get a panic attack. All that structure couldn’t completely crowd out irrationality, which crept in one evening around the first week and manifested in the form of my spending the whole night curating a Spotify playlist with kid-friendly music. At some point, I realized what a blunder this was and went to bed.
My first weeks were both brutal and not very memorable. Normally, according to veteran teachers I talked to, teachers and their students experience a honeymoon period that lasts until Halloween or so. Students (I was told) were better-behaved then because they had spent their entire summers blowing off steam and being lectured by their parents that this year was going to be the one where they really turned it around. Plus, every middle school kid is a bit shy, so even the rambunctious ones take a while to assert their dominance. That wasn’t remotely the case when I started. That promised two-month honeymoon period lasted about a week in reality. One student was immediately a menace and continued that way throughout the entire year—at least, he did when he was actually in the building and not out due to suspension.
Still, it’s hard to remember exactly what I did those first few days. I know I introduced myself, showed my students around my room, asked their names, and attempted to explain what we’d be doing in my class despite knowing barely more about our curriculum than they did. Beyond that, I think I just survived until the weekend and frantically typed in a common planning document for the substantive lessons that began during the second week.
As the year wore on, my confidence ebbed and flowed along with my enthusiasm for the job. I never really learned how to deal with misbehaving kids, especially when there were five or six of them in a class (this was the case in more than one class). Despite the exhaustion, the headaches, and the stress, I still found the capacity somewhere in my heart to like teaching. I liked forming strong relationships with the well-behaved students. I enjoyed making them laugh (and laughing at them in return). I cherished the days when the chronic misbehaviors were absent and I was able to catch a glimpse of what a well-functioning classroom full of eager students was like. These moments were the fondest I had as a teacher, and I’ll never let them go.
Unfortunately, they were all too rare. I began dreading going into the building because I knew what I’d be dealing with: ungrateful, spiteful, devious students who did everything possible to derail my class and get under my skin. Of course, that describes only a minority of students. Most were well-behaved and just wanted to get through a day without any major disruptions. But like ticking time bombs, the worst among them would explode at inopportune times and leave a wake of destruction in their paths. It got to the point where I was calling the behavior specialist three, four, or five times per day—and that was only for the students who rose to such a level that I could no longer ignore them. That constant feeling of tension was not good for my mental (or physical) health.
While I enjoyed the lesson planning component of my job, the conduct of the students was so bad that I almost didn’t make it past Thanksgiving. I’ve always had the Sunday-nighties (my Uncle Dan can relate), but it never reached the level that it did on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. I couldn’t stop thinking about how badly I did not want to return to school. It didn’t help that I had put my computer away at the beginning of the break so as not to think too deeply about work, which made me ill-prepared for the upcoming week. I needed that mental break, regardless of what it did to my enthusiasm for returning to school.
After I cleared that hurdle, though, I had basically resigned myself to finishing out the year. Indeed, I even made the fateful decision to return the following year for both utopian and practical reasons. I was optimistic that with a new principal and a full year of behavior management under my belt, I’d have a much better year than I’d had previously. Moreover, I didn’t want to go through the arduous process of looking and then applying for other jobs. So I returned to school in September of 2022 fully expecting to teach for an entire second year.
The rest, as they say, is history. I came out strong with a consistent approach to my curriculum and behavior approach, and this seemed to work for most of my classes most of the time. But one class in particular broke my spirit more quickly than I could have expected. That made me relax my standards for the rest of my classes, since the stress all but consumed me. This combined with a wholesale revamping of the way we were asked to deliver our curriculum completely laid waste to my optimism for my second year. And so by December, when I had heard about some job openings in D.C., I had already basically made up my mind.
I think the worst thing about my experience was how sharply it contrasted with my experience as a student. I always loved school; in particular, my middle and high school years were almost entirely positive. There was lots of laughter, challenging but rewarding school work, and a cast of teachers who all seemed to enjoy what they had chosen to do with their lives. That may be because I was in mostly honors classes and therefore didn’t witness much of the negative behavior that went on elsewhere. Still, though, something seems to have fundamentally changed over the past 15 years or so.
It’s hard to know for sure why things have changed so much. There are several attractive culprits: social media, the pandemic, cell phone use among kids, helicopter parenting, a general degradation of our culture, a newfound wariness of setting and maintaining high expectations, etc. Whatever the case, school has just gotten worse over time. That mismatch between my own experience as a student and what I dealt with as a teacher was remarkably humbling. When you build up expectations over time and reality falls short, it casts into doubt your own identity.
Of course, I’m not the only teacher whose dreams were shattered. Some people actually have it worse: They had always wanted to be teachers, but they were forced by their exposure to reality to turn elsewhere. I was lucky insofar as teaching was a profession I almost literally stumbled into.
We have to figure out how to do better. Universal public schools are a new invention relative to human history, but they’re not going anywhere. We’ll always need teachers to fulfill the vital roles of mentor, tutor, and architect.
The only way to do that, though, is for schools to reassert their control over students. “Restorative justice” and other kumbaya techniques of dealing with outlandish behaviors by asking the offender how he feels and giving him a Tootsie Roll won’t get us anywhere other than a living Hell. If you want to attract teachers to the profession, you can’t allow middle school students to get away with everything short of murder. That’s a recipe for disaster for everyone involved, including the kid whom you think you’re helping by going easy on him.
These days, I live in the education policy world in D.C. (It’s ironic that most of the education policy think tanks and organizations are located in our country’s capital because education is mostly a state issue, but that’s an issue for another newsletter.) It’s easy to get caught up in the latest proposal for changing the organization of the teaching workforce or how AI can be used to strengthen the education experience if used properly. But as a sharp colleague told me recently, all teachers really want to learn is how to control their own classrooms. You can enshrine all sorts of fancy innovations into policy, but at the end of the day, you can’t underestimate the importance of what happens in classrooms. Let’s hope that my D.C.-based friends figure that out sometime soon.
while i didn't invent the sunday nighties, i sure was the beneficiary of them. spoiler alert, they don't go away. hearing the ticking clock from the 60 Minutes intro on sunday nights at 7:00 felt like it was the system aligned against me reminding me (with an auditory ticking clock for god's sake) that i had not even begun my homework. and somehow i made it through. we all did. sometimes i don't know how and other times its perfectly clear. we really did hit the lottery. we were born in the usa into families that cared and showed the way. successes, failures, good choices, bad ones, they all led to this and i know i wouldn't change a thing. when my eyes are focused on what the directors want me to see, i'm pessimistic. but when i avert them, even for a moment, i get a glimpse of the truth and i gobble it up. relative to the 20 or years before it, that one a half year of yours had a disproportionate impact on who you are - for the better i think. by choosing to teach you averted your eyes. ain't that the truth.