why I quit

Later this morning, I’ve got to go to my classroom, pack up my stuff, and move it out. 

I’m sad.

When I moved here, I filled up one of those U-Haul containers (and that is a story…), and half of it was classroom stuff.  A couch, a rug, some lamps, hella YA books. I’m gonna leave most of it.

The teacher who is replacing me is super smart and an all-around badass.  I’m glad my kids will have her.

I liked my kids a lot.  I liked my co-workers.  I liked my principal.  I liked the families, the community. 

It’s hard to explain why I finally gave up, without, I fear, sounding like a real bullshitter, but here it is.

Definitely, part of it was just the chemical stuff of depression.  Dealing with a major depressive episode like this one was horrendous at home, surrounded by my people.  I just couldn’t take it anymore here, without any people.

Beyond that, when I feel the way I’ve felt the past few months, I can’t teach the way I want to, the way I think kids deserve.  I felt every hour, every day like I was mediocre as hell.  I could see what needed to be done; I would lie awake in the middle of the night with my mind racing about what each of my kids deserved, but I couldn’t do it.  I could barely make myself brush my teeth in the morning.  I would stand in my classroom as the kids worked away, trying to hold in my tears (many times unsuccessfully) while I counted the hours left until I could get home and back into bed, until I didn’t have to be awake anymore.

I knew it would get better with time.  My friendships with my co-workers would deepen, as would our collective capacity to collaborate.  I love collaborating with co-workers, designing visions for learning and responsively adjusting as we go along.  I knew that my relationships with kids and with their families deepen, too. It would get better.

But I also knew that I would get better at shit that I not only don’t care about but actually think makes the world worse. 

Use "the district's" curriculum.  Forget your own expertise.  "We did all the heavy lifting for you," I was for real told by one of the trainers.  I heard: "We determined what you should teach and how because you're probably not clever enough to do so yourself.  All that intellectual hoo-hah!  Leave the thinking to us.  You're just a data collector.  Here's a script, but don't worry, you can tweak it!" (I should say, my seriously lovely and brilliant principal really pushed me to take that "tweaking" to heart and do my thing.  But the only professional development available always came back to the scripted curriculum.)

“Managing.”  I’m all for discipline, and I’m deeply grateful to the people who helped me develop it.  But I couldn’t turn my brain off to the ways that school – even a school as seriously badass as the one I was at – is like prison.  Hall passes, and straight lines, and do what I say when I say.  The carceral state extended.

Take these tests, not because they matter to your humanity, to the sadness or excitement or hope or whatever you’re feeling about what’s going on in your life, but because they facilitate the surveillance of what we’re up to by people who don’t know or really care about either of us.   Don’t bring up the fact that the assessment is neither theoretically sound nor culturally sustaining.  Get them their data. (Who the fuck is them?)

Rt-fucking-I.  Uncritically take the goals handed to us by the system – goals for what to know and how to behave – and identify kids for intervention based on the ways they’re not up to snuff.  Label them by their deficits, not their assets, their dreams.  It’s more efficient that way.  Easier to pick out the ones for whom the best intervention is incarceration.

I can’t do it anymore. 

My therapist told me this week that there are some places where people spend years learning a practice, but that to actually be considered a master, they have to first leave their practice for at least twice as long as they spent studying it.  

Maybe I'll come back to teaching.  But for right now, something else.