This life, will hit you-hard. In the face.

A first year teacher's reflection on the first 5 months

This is what keeps me going.




She’s gonna learn that this life will hit you, hard, in the face, wait for you to get back up so it can kick you in the stomach.

For anyone who has spoken to me in the past few months, you know. I'm struggling. I'm sinking-no, that's too cliche- sinking implies that there is an end. I am completely decaying. I've been losing bits and pieces of myself for weeks on ends. My soul and passion has been rotting away, and my body has physically deteriorated. Mentally, my brain resembled a filter; absorbing nothing, losing everything but the bit that weighs the most. Defeat comes streaming from the top of my skull.

There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by band-aids or poetry, so the first time she realizes that Wonder-woman isn’t coming, I’ll make sure she knows she doesn’t have to wear the cape all by herself. 


Basically, this job is so much harder than I ever could have imagined. For weeks on end I have been going nonstop, being pulled in more directions than I thought possible. I never want to hear my last name screamed across a hallway again. I have taken on so much that my shoulders have forgotten how it feels to be weightless; I tried to jump to remember joy but my feet have forgotten how to leave the ground for even that brief moment of liberty; gravity, you see, demands I behave. It has laws, and laws must be followed.

When you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises. When you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you wanna save are the ones standing on your cape.

I by no means thought I would save my students. For all of the reasons that I decided to commit to Teach for America, the "white hero" complex was never one of them. I joined because I wanted to fix the educational system - I wanted students to know that there is so much more to learning and life than tests and a number assigned to you. I wanted them to know that someone cared for them and saw them as human beings, whether they believed it or not. I wanted them to learn about the world, not just about memorizing things for a test. That's what I wanted.


As I say now, "real talk": The American educational system has failed almost every child involved in the public schools, and now I've been made to feel as if it is my responsibility to fix it all for the 45 faces I stare at every day. But how can you want to go into battle for people who seem bent on self destruction, and are taking you down a step every time you encounter them? I am becoming a person I cannot stand-someone I swore I would never be. On top of that, just like every other educator, I find myself in the political crossfire. There are only so many write-ups you can have; you have to make sure you have certain things to display in the classroom; there are only so many students you can fail, according to the state-whether your students are mastering the content or not. And this has happened to them over and over. How else does someone reach the 9th grade on a 4th grade reading level?

Because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I’ve tried. When your boots will fill with rain and you’ll be up to your knees in disappointment

So I saw the reality of my classroom. I saw the daily chaos that is a classroom environment for my students. I've witnessed the threats and violence firsthand and have the marks to prove it. And I thought to myself: how? How has this happened? More importantly, what do I do about it?  

I have been scared, I have sobbed, I have been scarred, I have screamed, and I have succumb to failure-more times than I care to count. And I know that the next day, I will more than likely do the same thing over again. 

And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting I am ... pretty damn naive 

I came into this job very wide-eyed, high off of my institute experience and believing that I could succeed in the classroom. I believed I could handle anything the kids threw at me (figuratively) but was never expecting it to be a literal reality. I had the confidence that I was going to change someone's life. I told myself that this is where I was meant to be; that my life was finally falling into place, and that I was going to be strong enough to do whatever it takes to make my kids successful. Hell, was I wrong. 

 But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. 

There have been more days than I care to admit that I have thought to myself, "I could just walk away." Self preservation, if you will, to save myself from the panic attacks and the dread in my head saying "you'll never make it thru." That, my friends, is a real struggle. And on those days when I do get onto of bed, and simply survive the day, I look back. I realize that if nothing else, I did survive. Is that enough for the rest of my life? No. But those are the days that I have to remind myself that are things outside of my job, things that I have done and seen and can do, that my kids cannot or have not yet. 9 times out of 10, it depresses me. I remember sitting in the Dublin Airport a year ago, working on this same blog, and never expecting my life to be here a year later. But that is what it is. 

 And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say “thank you,” ‘cause there is nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it’s sent away.




These kids deserve a hurricane of change. That's what it's going to take to get them where they need to be. It has to be huge, furious, and impact them for years to come. 


Like the ocean, I have to keep crashing in. It may turn me into foam, dragging the debris of the lives I impact, but I am simply following the current. And grain by grain, the beach is shaped and molded. I'm by no means a hurricane- I'm a gentle, rolling surf. That means that my flat beach will take a hell of a lot longer to become a dune. And regardless of how much the beach changes, I an changing the ocean each time I take some sand back with me. 

You will put the “wind” in win some lose some, you will put the “star” in starting over and over, and no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life.

With all the pressure of this job, I forget that life is really beautiful. I forget how blessed I truly have been. It's so much easier for me to slip into my old mental struggle. I will by no means ever be free, I know that. And it has been defeating me the past few months, and I'm sure it will again. It's then that I begin turning to those I know who know me best, to give me hope that the my inverted life will one day be set right again.    And then I remember, that that is what most of my students are probably feeling, too. They have their very own struggles that they have to fight with all the time. They are much younger than me (almost 10 years- wow) and dealing with things that several people three times their age would fall apart dealing with. They have forgotten that there are positive things in the world. So that is my next challenge-to remind them, and myself, that it will all be okay.