two truths and a lie.

on saturday night, a friend of mine asked me to tell him two truths and a lie about my past week at school. i said, "i have a student who collects saliva in his mouth for fun, i was proposed to three times and i love every minute of being a high school teacher." can you guess which one was the lie? if you guessed the first one, you're wrong. i do, in fact, have a student who collects spit in his mouth for fun. it's not very fun for me, though. if you guessed the second one, you're also wrong. my students have brought sneaky sexual harassment to a whole new level. good times. now, if you guessed the third one... ding ding ding! you hit it right on the nose. ok, so i don't love every minute of being a high school teacher. do i love most of the minutes, or a lot of them anyway? yes. but definitely not all of them.

i was told that november was going to be one of the hardest parts of the school year. well, i survived november relatively unscathed. it's december that has done me in. coming back from thanksgiving was hell. i cried, i kicked and i screamed.. but i still had to get on that plane and fly back to charlotte. when i arrived at my departure gate on that sunday, one of the flight attendants made an announcement that they needed two people to take a bump and flight out the next day instead. you have no idea how much i wanted to take them up on that offer. as it turns out though, i needed to be back at school to teach the children early the next morning. that made me even more sad. is it normal to feel scared to death at the thought of having to go back to work? it may be a normal feeling for some people, but it can't be healthy! that first week back really wasn't all that bad. we had semi-solid plans in all my classes and the kids were ok. they really didn't want to be there any more than i did, but we tolerated each other just fine. and then came the next week.. and all hell broke loose.

two weeks ago made me want to shut myself in a closet and never come out again. students were being jerks, i was exhausted and unable to deal with their jerky-ness and overall, i felt like i had no control over my own life. not fun, my friends. i'm approximately 12 hours away from the only home(s) i've ever known, and despite the fact that i love the friends i have made in charlotte, it's just not the same. how do i deal with being sexually harassed by 16 year old boys? how do i deal with kids who just won't stop talking, and when i try to discipline them, they say truly cruel things? how do i handle it when all of my students are picking on just one kid? how do i deal with it when all of these scenarios are taking place in one day during one class, probably in the same 5 minute period? i don't know. and i didn't know, which is what made it so awful. i felt like i was doing a disservice to my kids by being there, as their teacher, and yet not teaching them anything. i can't get through any academic instruction if they're acting like animals. but i can't handle myself and my own emotions well enough to try to teach them to not act like animals. quite the quandary, i found myself in. and this persisted all week long - me sucking at teaching, my students sucking at learning. i felt guilty for doing a bad job, and i felt angry at my kids for doing a bad job. i wanted to cry every day, and some days i did. i thought back to all the positive things i've had to say in the past and i realized that i might have been in some la la land fantasy world. but in reality, i suck at this. ok, another quandary. if i suck at this, the one thing that i thought i wanted and needed to do with my life, where am i supposed to go from here? straight into an existential crisis, that's where. ahhh! all of this culminated in me breaking down on the saturday after hell week. the funny thing with break downs is that they make you feel better momentarily afterward. you kind of sigh and are like, ok, time to rebuild. but then sunday comes, and you realize you have to start all over again on monday. ugh.

i literally didn't know how i was going to show up on school on monday and do it all again. i didn't want to hear the disgusting comments from my males students or deal with notes being passed or snide remarks. i didn't want to deal with giving out bathroom passes so students could leave to go who-knows-where for 25 minutes. i didn't want any of it, not even the good things. it didn't matter to me that i'd probably see my favorite student, or that my second period class is usually really awesome. i don't know if it was just the difficulty of coming back from the thanksgiving holiday, or wanting to be home at christmastime or the fact that i'm not always awesome at my job.. but i felt like i truly could not go on. i felt like i'd rather burst into flames than step foot back into my classroom, or my co-teacher's classroom. in order to try to feel better, i tried talking to people about how i felt. they kept saying, "this is normal, there are a lot of people who feel exactly the way you do." unfortunately, that does not make me feel any better. i actually feel really horrible about that. it doesn't actually make me feel good to know that other people are miserable; it makes me feel much worse, in fact. ugh. this is when it becomes absolutely necessary to have an amazingly stellar social life outside of your sucky job. crap. i don't have that either. soooo, sanity, how do i find you?

sanity can be found in sick days, i have realized. my mother would disapprove, but i think it's true. if you need a break from your kids, and your kids need a break from you, what's wrong with taking a mental health day? i realized that when i'm exhausted and upset and wanting to hurt myself if it meant i didn't have to face my students, i cannot possibly be an effective teacher. that and the fact that i have started to have intense stomach pains when thinking about my students or when surrounded by my students or when doing any work for my students or anything at all that involved students in any way. that's bad, right? anyway... i rationalized this in my head, and i'm going to stick with the logic. if i think about it any more i'll start to feel bad. but those sick days have the potential of rejuvenating an individual. what i needed was a way to put my mind at ease and to feel like i could continue on. i don't know that i found that on my sick day, but it was definitely better than being miserable at school. and i came back the next day to hear about how my students missed me, and to grade my students tests and realize that, for the first time, EVERYONE had passed. that made me feel a little better.

despite the fact that i can feel myself going slightly crazy with my one job, teaching, i find myself applying for all sorts of other positions. i am the matriculation intern for my teach for america region, which means that i am in charge of the production and distribution of all the matriculation packets for the incoming corps members. this is an important job (at least that's what i tell myself) because the number of corps members coming to charlotte is going to double next year. we neeeeeed good people who want to be here. these students need them, us. i am also going to be a grad student starting this spring. i'm going to be working towards my graduate certificate in special education, which will lead to my permanent teaching license. very exciting stuff. considering it's free, i want to get my license here because i'll have reciprocal licensing in other states (like new york) where i might end up living after my years here in charlotte are over with. and now, i'm thinking of applying to go back to institute. this time, i wouldn't be going back as a corps member. i'd be going back as a staff member whose job is to support the corps members and their environment. i think that it is because of my experience that i'm realizing how important these supportive, behind-the-scenes positions are. this job is hard. it's so hard. and if there aren't caring people who are trying to make it as stable and manageable situation as possible.. then it won't be possible. and like i said, these kids need us.


when i applied for the position of matriculation intern, this is the letter of application that i submitted:

During the summer of 2006, I joined the Teach For America staff as a Campus Campaign Manager for my university. Despite the fact that I considered myself dedicated to the mission of Teach For America, I had no idea what the mission really meant. Even now, I only have two months of teaching experience, but I am beginning to truly understand what this mission, this responsibility, is all about.

This mission, now my responsibility, is about Devante. It is about Tamez, Michael, Symeon and Sharnee. It is about ensuring that my students receive the educational opportunities that they are entitled to. It is also about ensuring this same entitlement to the thousands of students in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools that I have never met.

In order to continue working towards this goal, of delivering an excellent education to the students of Charlotte, I want to be the matriculation intern for the Teach For America – Charlotte office. I want to provide support and information to as many incoming corps members as possible, and encourage them to find the same desire and responsibility to teach these children that I have. Based on my experiences in the classroom, and my passion for this mission, I believe that I would be able to assist the 2008 corps members with developing that same passion.

Because of the experiences I have had in my classroom thus far, I know that this problem cannot be solved during my two-year commitment as a Teach For America corps member. I know that I do not have the ability to serve as many children as is necessary in order to close the achievement gap in Charlotte, North Carolina. We need hundreds more qualified and dedicated teachers to join us in this mission. I will help to bring these teachers to Charlotte because I truly know how necessary they are to serve our students’ needs.

It is my job to instruct. It is my job to plan. It is my job to keep records. It is my job to constantly be in contact with members of the Charlotte community. But it is my passion to do these things for a valuable reason, which is to make certain that the students of my school receive the services they deserve. It is also my passion to make certain that students all over the City of Charlotte receive these services, which can only be done by helping to bring the next wave of Teach For America corps members to share in this mission.


in the end this is really the way that i feel. i love what i do because i understand its necessity and its importance. but that doesn't mean i can always sugarcoat it to sound glamorous, or that i'm trying to make myself out as a saint. not at all. i suck at this job sometimes, and i don't always act like a good person. this job provides me with a rollercoaster of emotions, which i'm sure i have reflected in this entry. i'm always torn between my love of my favorite students, and my hatred of classroom management issues; my love of advocating for the children, and my hatred of feeling helpless in front of an uncontrollable classroom; my passion for raising awareness and action to fight educational inequity, and my loathing of my 4:25 am alarm clock and being tired by 7 pm at night. the fact that my emotions are always on one end of the spectrum or the complete opposite is not helpful to my peace of mind, but that's how it is. that's how it has to be right now. this is the life i have chosen. and my children need me. i have to admit that i don't always make myself available to them, and i don't always serve them the best way i know how. but i'm doing the best i can with what i've got right now. and what i've got right now is an almost empty tank. i'm drained. i need this winter break to spend time sleeping and enjoying life, not worrying about accounting for every second of my 90 minute periods.

maybe while i'm home for christmas, i won't think about school at all. maybe i'll just think about how good it is to be celebrating the holidays with my family, and sleeping in my old bed and going to all our old hangouts. but probably not. even if it's just because people are asking me how my job is going, school is always on my mind. even if it's in the most indirect way. i had been thinking for awhile that charlotte is the hilton of teach for america placements, and maybe my school in particular was the hilton of school placements within our region.. but i still have students whose daily meals are only the ones they eat for free at school, or who go home to empty houses because their parents have to work around the clock to support them, or who do not go home at all because they don't have one, or who live in neighborhoods where they're forced to join gangs in order to feel protected or to try to make ends meet for their families. many of my kids go through hell every day after school, and school is the only stable environment they have. i don't want to cheapen their situations by making them sound cliche, because they are not cliche. they are real. i have to remind myself that, you know what, other people have it waaay worse than me. and some of those people.. are my students.