My first year of teaching was an absolute trainwreck. While I came in idealistic and showed promise in the beginning, I was an absolutely terrible teacher. I’m not sure if my kids learned anything. I couldn’t manage the classroom. While a lot of the school had altercations, my classroom was altercation central for kids that I didn’t even teach.
Yes, it was terrible. All the idealism and passion in the world to find educational inequities and injustice tends not to matter if you can’t teach. I learned last year that knowing what you’re talking about and being a master of your content, well, is kind of overrated. If kids don’t listen to you and you can’t be an engaging teacher, your lectures will always fall on deaf ears.
I mention how bad it was my first year because yesterday, I got my end-of-the-year evaluation, and was shocked by how much I have grown and improved as a teacher. I still think of myself as an average teacher. I still feel like an average teacher.
But it was a highly effective score on my evaluation (the highest possible). Last year, I barely made it to my second year with a developing score on my evaluation. Now, (some) of my kids are learning and listening. I’m much better at meeting kids where they’re at and maintaining a growth mindset with improving their skills, rather than giving continually rigorous content kids weren’t ready for.
I still have a long way to go. But if I can pinpoint one factor in the success, it would be this: staying the course. I would not have been able to become a better teacher if I quit. And there were plenty of times I did want to quit. There were plenty of times I woke up and said “I don’t feel like teaching today.” A lot of my friends cried themselves to sleep most nights, and I would always need ten minutes to sit in my car after work and just sit. I would have to decompress what the hell just happened and why I couldn’t do anything to make it better. My first year was a whole year where I felt 100% incompetent like any random adult could go into my classroom and do much better than me.
I did whatever I needed to do to show up the next day and keep going. I slept. I went out with friends. I saw a therapist. I wrote a lot. However bad it gets, the grace of God and many people, as well as sheer luck, stopped me from quitting. I don’t know if any job matches teaching in how brutal the first year can be. I can go on and on for days about the details. But the fact is you have to live it to truly know what I’m talking about. One in ten teachers quit by the end of their first year, an attrition rate that speaks to the hazing and shock of the first year.
Some days, a good day was showing up to work and making it through the day. But the fact remains the best thing I did was not to quit, to end up going from a terrible teacher to a highly effective teacher. Rounding out my second year of teaching, I am much wiser, but there’s still a great deal of guilt about how much I failed my students during my first year. They talk about imposter syndrome often these days but trust me when I say you never feel as incompetent as you do during your first year of teaching. It’s a whole year of being on a sinking ship of people depending on you to keep it afloat, and being able to absolutely nothing about it.
Some new teachers give the advice to make it through Thanksgiving. I concur. Stay the course not even until Thanksgiving, but then to January, to March, to May, and to the end.
I knew a lot of people who quit teaching their first year. We still keep in touch and we are still friends. And I completely see why they quit — anyone who has been in the classroom, whether they stayed or quit, is someone I respect.
I definitely knew in the darkest days of chaos that it would get better. But I never felt it. I never internalized it. If you read my writing from when I was in those very dark days, you will sense there’s very little hope in the tone and the details. However, I have hope now when it actually has gotten better. I realize the same lessons apply to most things — the only way for it to get better is to stay the course. Outlast the storm. Put all the misery away and come back if you can. It applies as a writer. It applies as a runner (not in the pushing through injury sense but outlasting the mentally difficult moments). It applies in graduate school.
While there’s a whole self-care industry that promises to make us feel better in exchange for money, we know ourselves best. When we’re in those darkest moments, asking for help, seeing a therapist, and doing whatever we can to stay the course are ways to finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. As long as we stay on the path, eventually, one day, it will get better.
Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash
Originally published on Medium on June 8, 2021.