Rediscovering What I Once Loved

The other day my therapist told me, "It sounds like the pain you feel isn't coming from the fact that you're considering leaving teaching, but rather that you've lost something you once loved tremendously and can't figure out how to find your way back."

I don't think anyone's hit the nail on the head harder for me in a long time. 

I have to admit that I frequently daydream about a life without the stress from teaching. In the past few years, I've questioned my impact more than ever, and that makes it really hard to put in the amount of effort teaching requires. I have this overwhelming sense that my return on investment in terms of my time and energy just isn't what it used to be. 

For a while, I thought this just meant that I need to leave teaching, that my place was no longer in the classroom. Honestly, it felt like a failure. I was putting so much of the weight of my classroom on my own shoulders that when it wasn't going how I believed it still could be, it felt like I deserved all the blame. 

Now, I know this is ridiculous. We are living in an era where the entire fabric of society has been radically shifted, and that ripples down into our classrooms, whether that's through the behavior of our students, the motivation and drive that seems to be missing more often than not for lots of our kids, or simply just my optimism (or lack thereof) about the future as a result of larger societal elements. 

I know that the changes in my classroom are not necessarily things I can control, but my anxiety around control and perfectionism often just plain old refuses to acknowledge and accept that. It has caused me a lot of pain over the past year-and-a-half, pain that I've carried every single day when I step into the classroom and then carefully try to mask when I'm with my students. 

For the past few months, the only solution I saw to escape this situation was to leave teaching, and possibly education as a whole. Every time I even thought that, though, there was a stab of pain. I love teaching. I truly do. I know it most clearly in the moments where I think about a life without it. Do I wish it was less stressful, that there was a better environment for teaching and learning than our current school system offers? Absolutely. Do I wish I could actually just leave teaching at the school when I go home and not think about the students who I'm worried about or how I could bring more joy to my classroom the next day? Yes, and I'm sure those around me would love it, too. 

Even with those pieces that I don't love, if I think about a life where I don't get to check in with a couple students each day to make sure they're okay, to help a student have a breakthrough moment with the learning and the pride on their face in the moment, or have a group of kids come play Mario Party in my classroom during lunch (this is a common occurance in room 801) – I can't imagine missing out on those moments. 

The problem is that the world has changed and teaching has, too. I realized that I'm spending so much time comparing the past few years to the years before COVID, and that comparison has been robbing me of the joy I know teaching can still offer. 

The best way I can describe it is as a relationship. If you ever want to ruin a relationship, just start comparing your current partner to all of your favorite things about your past one. Like, you will literally never be happy with your current relationship, not just because you are failing to acknowledge that it is a completely different situation, but also because rosy retrospection is a real thing. In the moment, we often have a tendency to see the negative, but when we look back on an experience we consider a good one, we often exaggerate the positive elements of it. I know that I've been doing this with teaching. 

So this is where I sit currently. I am beginning to fully understand that teaching is not going to be like the teaching I used to love, but I'm also beginning to grapple with the reality that it doesn't mean I can't love it again in a new way. 

The question is, how?

I am absolutely in the infancy of trying to fall back in love with teaching, but here's what's been helpful.

Intentionally Seeing the Positive

For starters, I'm beginning to actively identify the moments in my teaching day that bring me joy. These are intentionally small moments, but after the past year-and-a-half of focusing on many of the negative aspects of teaching and how it's changed, I really feel like I've lost some of my ability to see the good. In two class periods today, I was able to record seven things on a notecard that brought me joy, and I'm sure I missed many more. Sitting here as I write this, teaching didn't magically get better, but I feel much more joy than I've felt during my lunch in a long time. 

Adapt for Simplicity

One of my frustrations recently has been the overwhelming number of students who miss assignments. It throws off much of the sequencing, makes grading a bit trickier, and just generally throws off the culture of the classroom because you end up with students who feel so behind that they begin to be disruptive. This has been a bigger issue for me in the past couple years than ever before (and I'm not even counting the fully-remote year from COVID). Last year, I made the wrong move. I let things slide and was more lenient than ever before. This ended up making the problem worse for me. This term, I've shifted so that I've gone back to not accepting late work (read the Twitter thread for more details), but I've simplified my due dates. No matter what we do that week, it's due between that Friday and the following Tuesday. This, more than anything else I've done, has drastically reduced the number of assignments students miss. There is clarity, both for them and for me, about what needs to be done and when. It also helps me plan my workload better. I can plan for Monday or Tuesday as a day for me to stay a bit later to finish up everything and then don't have to worry about it until the next week. I'm also looking at simplifying the weekly schedule for instruction so that it is easier for me to plan and easier for students to understand the expectations. 

Embrace a Little Optimistic Nihilism

I stumbled across this term not too long ago, and I love it. The idea behind it is that we don't know what tomorrow will bring or if it will improve; the only thing we know is that we have the present. I don't know if I'll be in a classroom next year. Now, I can either worry about that and let it cause me stress, or I can say, "What would I do if this was my last year in the classroom?" I know first-hand of people who went into this year going, "Well, this is my last year so I might as well enjoy it," and it has turned into a wonderful year for them. I think as teachers, we sometimes get too wrapped up in what we feel like we need to be or do, and we overcomplicate things. For me, I want my kids to find joy and power in writing and fall in love with reading. As such, I have a meeting set up to talk to my administrator about stepping away from our curriculum to move towards a reading and writing workshop model where students get to read books they want and write about things that matter to them. Sure, there will be some other stuff sprinkled in that aligns with best practice in terms of instructional methods and some whole-class readings, but I know that this is the type of classroom I want to run, and if this is my last year in a classroom, it's how I want to go out. 

Do Something New With Something You Love

Often times when I feel apathetic or discouraged about teaching, it's because I find myself in a rut. I'm just doing the same thing I've been doing. I've taught the exact same grade level at the exact same school with the exact (almost) same curriculum for 7 years straight. For the past two years, my entire day has been English 9. When I was at my most bleak, the little bit of optimistic nihilism kicked in and I was like, "Screw it. None of this is working, so let's bring in some spoken word." I love spoken word poetry. In my first year of teaching I was given a class of 5 super-seniors who didn't graduate because of some jail time (side note: as a 23-year-old rookie, I have no idea how I ended up in this situation). However, those five students fell in love with spoken word poetry, and we ended up putting on our own slam at the end of the year. That moment, watching a bunch of kids perform their own poetry in front of a full auditorium, will always be one of the highlights of my teaching year, and as a result, spoken word poetry will always be something I associate with joy. So, this year I decided to just start bringing it in. One day a week we kick off class with a new spoken word poem and then spend a few minutes talking about it. That small change, which added almost no work to my plate, has brought in a weekly dose of joy that I needed. 

As I end this, I wish I could end by saying that as a result of all these things, I'm definitely going to be in the classroom next year. I can't say that, and I don't know if I'll be able to in June. I'm okay with that, though. I am not going to tie myself so strongly to being a teacher that I forget to love what I do. As I wrap this up, here's what I can say: I'm going to focus on making teaching the most enjoyable experience I can for the rest of this year and to look for new reasons to love it. 

We'll see what June holds when it gets here. For now, I'm only focused on today. Tomorrow will be a new day, and every day after that is its own for me to find joy, fulfillment, and love for what I do by looking for it even in the darkest of times. 

For those of you reading this and feeling this too, you're not alone. There are lots of us struggling with this right now. So often these discussions get clouded by the problem or blanketed over with toxic positivity. Please know that I'm not advocating for pretending everything is fine. It's not. I'm advocating for honest discussions about the reality of teaching, but for your own sanity in your day-to-day practice, look for the good. It's there. 

My love for teaching isn't gone. It's there. I just am having a hard time figuring out how (and if) I can access it again, but I'm not ready to quit fighting to access it again.

Hang in there, friends.