To paraphrase my dear friend, Emily: Here is my letter to the school that only spat on me.
I couldn’t stay. Deep in my truest heart, I knew that. A part of me marvelled at what I was doing, that I was only just out of college and I was in my field, pursuing my passion, not just for teaching, but for teaching those rough and tumble kids from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks. How had I been so fortunate? I wondered. How could this girl have been so lucky?
The answer is that it wasn’t wonderful. Oh, the teaching was magic. When it was just my students and me and great literature, I loved it. I knew I had a lot to learn, but I loved it. It was everything outside of the classroom that I couldn’t stand. I hated the emotional manipulation, the negativity, the lack of morale, the insults, the lack of professionalism, the fact that I wasn’t treated with dignity as a professional–or even as a human being.
And yet I wanted to go back. Stubbornly, the fighter in me, the part that loved those trash-talking, troubled students, said that I should give it another try. I wouldn’t give up on what I had started. I wouldn’t walk away from what had been my dream after just one year. It wasn’t just the fighter that resisted giving up. More than that, it was the thought of those precious students. I see their faces now then, when I’m driving down the highway, when I’m drifting off to sleep at night, and my heart breaks that when they walk past my classroom in the fall, I won’t be there. I’ll just be one more middle-class Anglo woman who gave up on them. “Students!” I want to cry, “Dears! I didn’t give up on you. I gave up on the disorganized, misguided, corrupt mess of school that is engaged in the charade of educating you, you who need it more than anyone so you can break the cycle of poverty and violence into which you were born. It was the school I gave up on, not you.” I think in particular of one angry young man who never did anything in class except sleep or swear. Despite his lack of performance, he liked me, I think because I was kind to him, joked with him–treated him like a human, a good person, even if he didn’t want to do much to reinforce my views. I promised him that when he was repeating my class next year, I would ask for him. I can only imagine the outburst that will accompany his discovery that in the end, I gave up on him, just like everyone else.
I discovered first hand why all the best teachers go to the most successful schools (the ones which arguably need them the least). I always imagined these teachers flocked to the successful school districts for selfish reasons: better pay, better working conditions. The difficult kids in the tough school may not be everyone’s preference, but I figured if you chose that you chose that; the difference is the students, not the schools. Even at schools with less-than-stellar teachers, I naiverly reasoned, aren’t they all still teachers, trying in their own way to reach their students?
The answer is no. I understand now why good teachers won’t stand for what I endured and had to finally convince myself was too emotionally and psyhologically harmful to stay. No one with a strong sense of self-worth and confidence in their skills will stick around to be treated like trash, mocked, and ignored. The problem with getting teachers in struggling schools is not the students. I long for those students. The problem is that the schools treat the symptoms, not the problems, they don’t have enough pride to instill any in their teachers, never mind their students, and they don’t have the desire to recruit truly quality teachers and treat them in accordance with their talent.
I have seen a school fail its needy students desperately.
I have never seen a truly stellar school reaching out to these students.
Maybe I will never teach at one.
Maybe I will start one.
