The Woes of a (Former) Teacher
24: my past with teaching & how I’m not sure I should ever go back, plus how I feel about working now
Warning: MAJOR story time
Working Girl
Once upon a time, Gabby was 16 and got her first job at Color Me Mine, a pottery-painting chain akin to As You Wish. They were franchise-owned and my mom vaguely knew the owner of a nearby location from one of her workout classes. So, I was hired off-the-record as extra hands. All the 18-year-olds worked the kiln and the cash register, but I was not “old enough” to do so. They were all really kind to me, except for our boss, the owner.
There was a very interesting dynamic between the owner and a family member of hers that was on staff. You see, the employees would paint the examples we put on the shelves, but when that hired family member got mad at the owner, she would throw her current masterpieces at our boss, sending them crashing against a wall. This was obviously not a healthy work environment for me, but what did I know? This was my first job.
After working there on busy weekends and for booked parties for two summers, I ended up leaving when I was accused by the owner of stealing money from the cash register. Please keep in mind that 1. I was not allowed access to the cash register, 2. I didn’t steal money from the cash register, and finally: 3. Only $5 was missing. This woman screamed at me, telling me she knew I took it. And I, unknowingly being gaslit, crazily started questioning myself. Did I accidentally take money from the register? Needless to say, I didn’t return the following summer. That location was also shut down a year or so later.
I can’t help but feel that this first job paved an interesting view of work for me, especially as someone whose reality had been questioned by people I trusted more than this crazy boss person. Looking back, working anywhere before I went to therapy sounds laughable. I continued to be put in situations where older staff took advantage of their position over me instead of pouring into me as someone new who needed help.
Teaching Before Therapy
After Color Me Mine, I worked exclusively in childcare. I worked at a preschool in Flagstaff and babysat some kiddos. Upon graduating, I took a job at what I believed to be the perfect place for me: an arts-focused public school. I had done a semester of practicum there in a first grade class and decided that it was where I wanted to be. My mentor teacher decided to retire that year and recommended me for her position. With her recommendation and some great letters from college professors I deeply respected, I was hired as their newest addition to the first grade team.
Stepping into the role of the main teacher was super intimidating for me. I had an idea what I needed to do to start off strong. I thought I was prepared, but I became extremely overwhelmed very quickly. I was anxious 24/7 with no time for any other hobby, any chore, or to relax at home without feeling like I was neglecting my work. I was constantly lesson-planning, grading, and preparing. It felt neverending and all-consuming.
It didn’t help that my team my first year was made up of teachers that were not too thrilled to have to “babysit the new kid,” as one of my teammates put it. (The other teacher was downright bullying one of my students, but that’s a whole other story…) I felt like a burden because I was constantly told I was. I tried to avoid asking for help if I could manage it. Spoiler alert: I could not manage it. It’s ironic that in the interview process, I said the only trait that my team needed was kindness, because they didn’t have that to give. My first year ended online due to Covid and it was through a group Teams call that I learned that both of my fellow first grade teachers were leaving. I had been talking to two other teachers gunning for first grade spots that were excited to hear of the development. I was relieved to find teachers who talked to me like a friend and wanted to work closely with me.
Working online at first, then hybrid (half in the class, half at home…stories out the wazoo there), and then fully in-person really made me confident in my communication skills and assignment creation. My team had me believing that they too thought I was a capable and talented part of their team. I truly believed they were my friends. It took a quick turn for the worst when, oddly enough, I wanted to throw a holiday party for my students and my teammates did not. It created some friction when I followed through with my plans.
After that, it was a rollercoaster. On any given day, I was not sure if they were going to be supportive teammates to me, until I knew for sure they were not. They signed me up for something that would greatly inconvenience me, pretending I had signed off on it myself. It was an interesting situation to explain to admin. I realized they only wanted me around to listen to them complain about their husbands and rat on other teachers; they didn’t care about me. I was eager to get away from these grumpy middle-aged women, so moving to a younger team teaching kindergarten seemed like a good idea. I held out hope they had kindness in their hearts their resting bitch faces could not accurately portray. I sadly found out a couple things: that was just how their faces looked, they seemed to hate their jobs to the fullest degree, and they surely did not give a shit about me.
“One day, when I’m old and wise, I’ll think back and realize that these were all completely normal events.”
And here’s when my son came to save the day. When I got pregnant, I became very sick and was not consistently mentally/physically present in the classroom. I was running outside to throw up in planters and was too nauseous to eat most things. I was an obvious wreck. My team was not supportive during this time, and even went as far as to accuse me of lying about the severity of my sickness. I was still required to lesson-plan as I normally did while sick at home, however— since I was out of vacation days— the substitute teacher was receiving my pay.
This was, as my therapist put it, my first big parenting decision. I told my principal I would be leaving at winter break and I felt huge relief (especially after I threw up coming out of her office lol). I had been feeling massively guilty about leaving students who were just warming up to me, but I simply could not function at work. I weighed less than I did before I was pregnant, I had a hard time sleeping or eating, and I couldn’t do anything to help my husband at home. I still feel twinges of guilt for leaving sometimes and it still hurts my heart to think of how I had to leave those students (especially when I don’t ever get to know what happened with them), but it was definitely the right decision for me to leave.
Once a Teacher…
When I think of the younger Gabby, the teacher version of me, I can’t help but feel bad for her. Younger Gab just thought work was supposed to be that life-sucking. But it shouldn’t be. And having to choose between work and the health of you and your family is not something I thought I would be so shamed for. Don’t get me wrong, there were other people on staff I enjoyed and made me feel liked, but I didn’t get the opportunity to work closely with them. I felt very alone while working there. I’m sure I would have had a slightly better experience with a better team, but there were a lot of other factors that made my days as a teacher difficult.
The school I worked at was in a low-income community where over 60% of the families connected to our school were at or below the poverty line. Instead of receiving extra supplies and funding (as I think we were meant to as a Title 1 school), I had to put a lot of my own money into my classroom. I felt so thankful to get so much help from family in funding and setting up my classroom (even when it just added more guilt to the guilt I already had for leaving— they had financially invested in me), but it was hard to anticipate the needs of the class.
Due to the home situations of many of my students, focusing on academics was close to impossible. There are many—TOO many— stories I could tell about students (runners, desk-turners, and extreme criers), parents (accusers, neglecters, and bad examples I was afraid to be alone with), and coworkers (unhelpful admin, no-consequence principals, and a shortage of teachers and paraprofessionals as a whole), and sharing my story with other teachers helps remind me of many reasons I wouldn’t go back to teaching. When I found these online spaces where former teachers shared my same experiences, I felt sad for us and validated by it all at the same time.
Being a teacher meant I had to be on from 7:30am to 3pm. And with only a 30 minute lunch that was always interrupted by parents, I usually didn’t have time to eat. I couldn’t count on anyone to come cover for me so I often neglected to drink water to avoid needing to use the bathroom. Even before I was pregnant, I was some sort of a zombie. But I still held so much guilt for thinking of leaving because I didn’t want to be a quitter.
“At times you’ll want to say, ‘I have nothing left to give.’ But a life that’s lived halfway is no way to live”
It’s my professional opinion that all classrooms need at least two adults for safety and practicality reasons. My first year of teaching, I had an aid in my class for a specific student that honestly kept me sane most days— someone to bear witness to the madness. The next year when she moved up a grade with her assigned student, I felt so lonely without her.
The teacher shortage was made very apparent when one of our staff left without notice and we had perpetual substitutes in a 4th grade classroom. Due to the shortage, our staff felt emaciated. I was left to make many high-pressure game-time decisions and deal with many class-halting situations completely solo, with no admin, child psychologist, or aid to help. It would have been great to have someone stationed in my class my first day of kindergarten when three undiagnosed students made it absolutely impossible to teach. Crazily, the principal came in to act as a student-aid after I called multiple times.
There was also the part of my job involving parent interaction. Of course, the more a student struggled, the more I met with the parents and— in many cases— each meeting with the parents made it more and more clear why the student struggled to begin with. As someone who— at the time— had not been through any therapy for how I was treated by adults as a child, it was very triggering to talk with those particularly difficult parents. I learned exactly why an anxious student vomited every time we took a test, I saw exactly where the show of anger and control was being exemplified to an aggressive student, and I saw why so many students struggled to find their voice when I met with parents that didn’t care to listen to what I had to say about their child’s development.
Every child in my class was at a different level of learning, but so many of them lacked the support needed at home to be able to succeed in a classroom environment. My love of children led me to teaching, but teaching showed me just how much power a parent has in completely f*cking up their children. When you spend time with someone’s child for 8 hours a day, you get a very clear picture of what their home life is like, and how their parents treat them. And I felt a lot of pressure to help these children feel loved at school in a way they didn’t feel at home.
It is almost impossible to capture the attention and gain the trust of a child who was not ever shown a reason they should trust an adult to keep them safe. My heart truly went out to all of my students and I cared about them deeply. I even had dreams about not letting them down and woke up saying their names. However—no matter the progress we made emotionally— being their teacher left me in no place to make real change in their scattered home lives. I felt helpless seeing them walk away with parents I felt didn’t have the right to be parents. It was a dark and lonely reality I attempted to reside in for my 2.5 years of teaching.
Teaching was what I got my degree in, because it’s what I used to think was my calling. I felt pulled to it. I wanted to be a teacher. But it seemed being a teacher didn’t want me, it couldn’t. The job requires a lot of emotional energy which I thought was perfect for me, but it ended up taking all I had and leaving me with no energy for anything else. I love children, and there was a lot about teaching that I did enjoy, but I’m just not sure I should attempt a return to a career that seemed to take so much more than it gave me.
Recovering Myself
I still generally have a lot of anxiety at work. People in authority tend to freak me out and my people-pleasing tendencies both help me professionally and hurt me personally. It feels illegal to be honest at work, my social anxiety can make meetings more emotionally taxing than they should be, and— due to my body keeping the score— my emotional triggers tend to set off my IBS (so you can find me working remotely from the ladies’ room). However, working in a project management position with a more flexible schedule and all-around nicer coworkers with similar interests to me is a huge upgrade from the work environment I once settled for.
I would say it’s still really hard for me to tell what’s normal to feel at work. I have not had many different jobs and the jobs I’ve had are in very specific work environments. What even is normal anyways? I can only focus on what I like and don’t like and compare my now to my then. Did I have strengths that are only now being drawn out in my new position? Were some of my weaknesses exacerbated when I worked as a teacher? I want to be able to work in a field where I use the gifts I already have in abundance. My friend posted a great quote the other day on Instagram about this.
Overall, I don’t want to spend my life focused on success, money, and work. I want to have a job that gives me enough money to live on and gives me the most time possible to live my life. I don’t want to look back and have mountains of regret hanging over the time I could have spent with my family. I want to make sure I make time for relationships and hobbies that gives me life.
My hope is for all of us to find our thing. I am trying to figure out if project management is mine. Maybe it’s writing. Or maybe each season of my life will bring an opportunity for me to learn new things about myself in a different job. Society has put a lot of pressure on us to choose a career and do that 40 hours a week for our entire lives, but I don’t want to give into that pressure.
I really don’t have any regret. I have always been doing the best I could do at any given time and I have plenty of stories I plan to share about me doing just that. It feels refreshing to reflect on this and be honest to people online the way I felt I couldn’t do when it actually happened. I still have people asking me how teaching is going because I was so overwhelmed by the mess of feelings I had when leaving that I didn’t know how to tell anyone or “announce” it, per say. How could I summarize? I honestly don’t know how.
But now, as I do often here at Gabbin’ Away Again, I want to put my embarrassment and joy over leaving teaching on display to showcase how human it is to experience the spectrum of our emotions. I wanted to be this teacher version of myself I pictured in my head that had all her shit together, but that just couldn’t be reality for me. It was hard to accept that.
I do my best to summarize out there in real life, but it always comes out interestingly.
“My son made it apparent he wanted my full attention. Now I’m a teacher of one.”
“I don’t know if I trust the education system anymore. Public school is super messed up and— did you know private schools have roots in racism?”
But, since you know the whole story now, I can summarize by saying:
“I loved teaching children, but being a teacher wasn’t sustainable for me. My main focus now is being a mom, artsy hobbies, and having a flexible job I enjoy.”
“So I hope I learn to get over myself. Stop trying to be somebody else.”
Time for some TLCCC
Treating myself to: 🍫 a stomachache amount of brownies
Listening to: the AI Spotify DJ— it’s kinda fun! 🎵
Crafting: a family calendar for our kitchen ($3 at Target) and wrapping ALL Christmas gifts 🎁
Craving: water lol I am so dehydrated
Caring SO much about: the apps Costar and Stardust — I love when friends share fun little apps with me 🥰