Failure and Letting Go

I am a bit of a perfectionist, but I’m also incredibly messy. I let things go that I don’t feel like dealing with, while I obsessively focus on others. I enjoy makeup and nail polish, but I’m very overweight. I value success, and yet I am a failure. I’m a contradiction for the ages.

In 10 days, I will be leaving my teaching career behind. I will also be leaving the high school I started it in. In a year and a half, I went from an anxious, hopeful new teacher to a more anxious, ineffective new teacher. I thought I was finally getting things right. It took me 10 years and a lot of stops and starts, but I received my Bachelor’s degree with Magna Cum Laude honors. I got one of the first jobs I applied for, and I got to teach something I loved dearly. I got an apartment more than big enough for two and I adopted a dog. I was making my first liveable adult wages at the age of 28. Then it all came crashing down.

It would be easy to say that I don’t know what happened, but that isn’t true. When I came home from my first day of teaching at the end of January 2017, I cried. I was inconsolable and I wasn’t sure if I could go back the next day. I went back and I made a few connections with students, talked about history when I could be heard, and tried to keep my head above water. I did not get a mentor until a month after the semester started, and I felt like I was constantly behind. E-mails from parents would destroy a whole evening, and I didn’t find out until the middle of March that students had to make up time with the teacher if they missed more than 3 days. One of my classes got wildly out of hand and it spread to the other two soon enough. I started throwing up every morning before work. I think I only received a contract renewal because our new principal (my first one resigned after a month) had too much to do to see the chaos.

I went home and spent the whole summer creating a curriculum for the class I wanted to teach, American History II. I started the 2017-2018 school year with hope and I felt decently prepared. I wasn’t. Not at all. Even though I felt more sure of my content and my teacher personality, I just couldn’t discipline students the way administration wanted. I hated making phone calls to parents, and half the time, I couldn’t get an answer. If I tried to redirect students, I would get backtalk, cursing, and refusals to do anything. When I asked administration for help, they said to call home. Despite my confidence and the connections I was able to make with many more students, I spiraled and found myself with a letter of intent to non-renew the day that Christmas vacation started. Basically, if I didn’t shape up, I’d be fired.

I tried and tried, but I ended up handing in my resignation letter in March. I love teaching and talking about history, but I hate behavior management and being responsible for the actions of 90 hormonal teenagers. I hate having to be “on” 24 hours a day and feeling the bile rise in my throat every morning that I have to report to work. I hate having to tell a 16 year old to put his shoes back on and I hate having to navigate the politics of a deeply dysfunctional school. Being in this abyss of mismanagement and skewed priorities leaves me drained, and I come home every day feeling like I’ve run a marathon.

There are many more blog posts to write about my time at this prison, but this experience has left me shattered and more unsure of myself than ever before. I tried my hardest. I spent hundreds of dollars on interesting activities while many teachers still have students answer questions at the back of the book. I thoroughly researched every topic that I taught and I constantly used pop culture references to make the subject relatable. I went incredibly far out of my comfort zone, and in the end, perseverance didn’t really matter. I know in my heart and my mind that this was the wrong place for me. I know that I made a lot of mistakes, and I know that I was shafted just as often. I know that dwelling will not let me move forward.

When I finish school on the 14th, I plan on finding a way to metaphorically burn this effigy. I may have failed, and it may take me a long time to move forward, but I have to let go and find a profession in which I am valued and allowed to be less than a martyr. There’s more for me than this. I just have to find it and let it light my way forward.