The teaching dreams. They haunt me. In them I have no control, no power. Students laugh at me, ignore me, and challenge me. There is a cacophonous symphony on every side. Chaotic chords in the minor key. My heart pounds in my chest. My face is flushed. My mind goes everywhere and nowhere. I can feel everything slipping away. Every last bit of control.
Five years later the dreams still flare up when I am anxious, uncertain, or afraid of something in my life. I wake up feeling sick to my stomach, and my head knows I don’t have to walk into the classroom that day. But the classroom is still in me. Class is in session. In my dreams I am frozen in time.
“None of you should be here”
I spent two years in an alternative route teaching program called the Mississippi Teacher Corps, a program that takes people without teaching degrees, trains them in a summer crash-course, and places them in a critical needs school. All while earning a free Master’s degree through weekend classes.
On our first day, the program director told all of us bright-eyed and energetic soon-to-be teachers, “None of you should be here. The best teachers in the country should teach in the most difficult schools. But they’re not here. They don’t want to teach in these schools. So here we are.”
We soon dove into the deep end of teaching summer school. You can’t learn to be a teacher without actually teaching. We watched our experienced mentors teach for about two days before making the jump. It was a terrifying jump.
We were like first responders, and we had just about six weeks to learn how to respond to the critical needs of the students in our very own classrooms. Curriculum. Classroom management. Teaching strategies. Organization. Assessments. Communication with parents. Before I knew it I felt like a first responder asked to perform surgery.
Maybe I shouldn’t be here
Summer school was a roller coaster, a whirlwind. It was painful, and then it was numbing. I think I was in shock. Each day I felt like I could step on a landmine at any moment and end up with the most vulnerable parts of me blown to pieces in a room full of 17- to 21-year olds just dying to make their summer classroom a fun spectacle of gladiatorial hilarity. There were spitballs. Real spitballs. A student once locked eyes with me and swaggered straight toward me until his face was in my face.
That summer I was still “Ms. Schmidt”; Lloyd and I would get married at the end of the summer. In my classroom the students coughed “Ms. Snitch” and “Ms. Shit” behind their hands. One day a student took off his shoes in the middle of my lesson and urged the girls around him to smell them. “M’Schmidt, why can’t you get some order in here?” a student called out above the laughter. Another day at the height of mutiny, a student looked me in the face and said, “All these teachers in this school–have y’all taught before? Are you real teachers?” and I responded hesitantly, “Yes, we are teachers.”
One day a bad fight between two girls broke out in the middle of my lesson, and the male teachers who were in the room observing me had to break it up. One of the girls was expelled from summer school. This was her last chance to get that credit to graduate, and I knew that if I had been able to keep the room more orderly, the tension between the two girls wouldn’t have been able to build.
A room of my own
When I left to teach in my own sixth grade English classroom that fall, I had a new wave of energy and confidence. I would be teaching people mostly shorter than me who looked like children and were undeniably children.
Matthew, my teaching partner from the program, and I had connecting classrooms in a separate building from the main school called the Annex. His room was a converted football locker room; mine was next to the dumpster and felt like a genuine steam room or sauna in the Mississippi summer. Twice-baked school lunch garbage liquefied in the humid heat and wafted into my room. I made the most of the space I was given, hanging up a white sheet to use as a projection screen and buying a couple huge sheets of panelboard at Lowe’s to mount on the walls as whiteboards.
On top of the heavy newness of classroom management and instruction, the day was full of flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants details. A couple times throughout the day Matthew and I would poke our heads into each other’s rooms and ask things like, “What’s up with the lockers? They told us to assign them to students, but I don’t even know at which number the lockers begin and at which they end. I don’t even know what the numbers are.” Students thought we were married. Or cousins. It seemed like everyone in the class had at least one cousin in the room.
Can I just teach?
Just getting students to enter my classroom was the first challenge. They hid behind cars in the parking lot that abutted my classroom. Backpacks flew onto the roof. They chased and dodged each other on the sidewalk, playing out the recess they never got to have.
Once I got them into the room, the next challenge was having enough order in the room to be able to teach. Anything. Anything at all. Making a space where teaching and learning could occur required a very rigid system of rules and consequences that the program taught us to use. It felt unnatural and harsh, but I had a responsibility to teach the students and keep them safe, and I didn’t know of a better way.
There is an intense breed of in-the-moment presence that is required for managing a classroom. Every day you just have to keep going, keep moving, never stop, keep going, eyes forward, chin up. You spend your day talking more than you probably ever have in your life and repeating yourself over and over again. You get used to an incessant hum of noise and movement. Your eyes scan the room like a predator’s. Knees tapping, pencils balancing, heads turning, papers falling, backpacks zipping, chip bags rustling. Your attention darts left to right, right to left, foreground to background.
CAN I HAVE AN ERASER – HE TAPPED ME ON THE BACK – CAN YOU TELL HIM TO GET HIS FEET OFF MY DESK – CAN I GO TO THE BATHROOM – DO WE HAVE TO WRITE THE QUESTION – WHAT TIME DO WE GET OUT OF HERE – UGHHHH SOMEONE FARTED – WHAT PAGE IS IT ON – CAN I GO TO THE BATHROOM – IT’S HOT IN HERE – I DON’T HAVE ANY PAPER – YOU FEELIN’ IT! – TOMORROW’S MY BIRTHDAY – HE JUST SAID THE B WORD – ARE YOU AND MR. GIOIA COUSINS – MY LEAD BROKE – CAN I GO ASK MR. WILLIAMS A QUESTION – WHAT’S THIS WHITE STUFF ON MY DESK – CAN YOU TELL HIM TO STOP LOOKING AT ME – KEYANA’S TALKING – ARE YOU ON FACEBOOK – CAN I GO TO THE BATHROOM – IT’S COLD IN HERE – THAT WASN’T ME – SOMEONE WROTE IN YOUR BOOK – CAN YOU SPRAY SOME FRESHENER – DO YOU BELIEVE IN A BLACK JESUS – CAN I STEP OUT – CAN I THROW THIS AWAY – I NEED SOME TISSUE – THEY KEEP CALLING MY NAME – CAN I EMPTY MY SHARPENER – CAN YOU STAPLE THIS – I’M ABOUT TO USE IT ON MYSELF – HE MADE ME RIP MY PAPER – HOW OLD ARE YOU – JAMES HAS FOOD – IT’S HOT IN HERE – CAN I GO TO THE BATHROOM.
You become robotic.
sit down. put that away. no you may not. warning. sit down. raise your hand. stop talking. that’s off-topic. yes. face the front. get to work. copy assignment. no. sit down. no. no. put that on my desk. no. talk to me after class. read the directions. stop talking. go quickly. sit down. no. step outside. warning. raise your hand. you have after-school behavior training. no. sit down. i will be calling your house tonight. sit down. yes. do that after class. sit up. that’s off-topic. wait ten minutes. open your book. no bathroom. put your feet on the floor. read the directions. no. seriously? you’re late. sit down. you know better. who has my sharpener? turn around. it’s just a roach; calm down. that’s off-topic. sit down. read the directions. get back to work. pick up your head. no. yes. take your hood off. is that appropriate school language? take the yellow vest. no bathroom.
At the end of the day you feel like you haven’t communicated anything. You’re overtalked and undercommunicated. To just be able to teach the lesson you spent hours crafting would be a success.
Before I started the Mississippi Teacher Corps, I talked to teachers in the program who told me, “There’s really no way for you to understand what this will be like until you experience it for yourself.” Virginia Woolf’s character Clarissa Dalloway says that “Love makes you solitary.” I found that teaching makes you solitary. It is an intense experience that you can describe to others all you want (and more than they want), but there is no way to infuse in them the feelings you have experienced in your classroom. It’s a lonely journey. No matter how many supportive people you have in your life and at your school, you are the one who has to walk into that classroom alone every morning.
First, do no harm
The weight of the responsibility for teaching and guiding my students almost crushed me. I felt like I was committing malpractice at every moment due to my incompetence. First, do no harm. Was I doing no harm? Would the kids be better off without me there? This was a question that ate away at me.
I was terrified that at parent-teacher conferences I would be discovered as a fraud. This type of scenario played through my head: “Yes, I teach your baby. Do I know why she got such a low grade on test 3? What did she not understand about the material? Hmm…you know, I can’t really pinpoint it, but it may have been the fact that I taught the material in a confusing order, and by the time I figured out how to teach it the right way, all the students were bored with the material.”
The self-examination set in. What am I doing here? Am I helping anyone? Am I teaching anyone anything? Why am I putting myself through this experience if I’m not even helping anyone?
My strengths failed me
I thought that being a sensitive, empathic person would be a strength as a teacher. My finger rests on the pulse of the emotions of a room. I can intuitively feel other people’s energies and perceive their motivations. I can really listen to people. I can make them feel that I care about them when I look in their eyes and listen with my whole face. Those sound like great qualities for a teacher to have.
Here’s the thing. The listening skills I valued in myself didn’t translate well to my classroom. I never felt like I could look one student in the eye and give them even thirty seconds of undivided attention. I trained my eyes to scan the room looking for any trouble brewing, any mounting tension between students, as fights were not uncommon and could erupt in seconds. I didn’t want anyone injured under my watch. And it felt physically impossible to give my attention to one student; the waves of constant stimulation across the room overpowered me.
My empathic nature was overworked. I felt like I was attending an emotional rock concert every day. I could feel the deep pain under students’ angry and defiant behavior. On top of that, all the normal hurts, slights, and private disappointments that come from middle school life caused a thousand dramas in the day.
I tried to be a buffer, the padding on the wall to absorb the sound of all those emotions. I tried to be the calm, steady force in the room. It took all the energy I had in me, and I often failed, adding another shouting voice to the collective noisy pain machine. The sound waves of 140 heartbeats layered on top of each other left me confounded.
I left school feeling deaf, my heart buzzing, vibrating with the echo of all the emotions that had blared at me for eight hours. My senses became overreactive, my sympathetic nervous system on constant alert. The day replayed on a loop in my head. All those emotions either seeped out of me once I got home or I tried to turn them off because I had no more room for emotions. I wanted to empty myself of all of them, even my own. I started covering my ears so I could survive.
I changed
My first year teaching I yelled in the classroom even though I’m not the type to yell. I became irrationally angry with children. In my worst moments I said mean, bitingly true, snarky things to kids just to have some sort of power and victory. It felt good for a moment when I could make the kids laugh and have them on my side, even at the expense of a classmate. In my bad moments I turned into the adult bully. I wasn’t the only one doing this; most of the teachers in the classrooms around me did the same thing. But I never thought I would, and it didn’t excuse me.
I was happy when certain kids didn’t come to school. I became detached and felt nothing when I found a note on my floor at the end of the day that said, “ms gray is a bitch. she can suck my dick.” I threw it away and kept sweeping the debris of chip bags, empty hot sauce packets, and crumpled paper that littered the floor just like the mosh pit it felt like I managed.
The kids were kids. They wanted to have fun. They wanted to impress each other and to add some entertainment to their school day. Overall, school had not been a positive or meaningful place for many of them. Most of them performed way below grade level; some could hardly read. Corporal punishment was still in use and very actively wielded as a consequence. I served as a witness to paddling on more than one occasion.
The students lacked emotional control, sound judgment, and boundaries, as kids often do. They made me crazy and kept me up at night, but they were not the most difficult thing to face in the morning.
I didn’t like the person I was in my classroom.
My shadows grew
I joined Teacher Corps because I thought I could do something good. I thought I could give back to Mississippi, the state that had given me so much. I thought this could be an act of gratitude for the incredible education I had received and a way to respond to the privilege I inherited at my birth.
“There aren’t many assholes who do this kind of thing,” our program director told us early on when assuring us that we would make close connections with the other teachers with us on the journey.
But I saw myself becoming an asshole. I saw myself becoming someone I didn’t like. Matthew and I liked to say, “We became friends at our worst.” We clung to each other as our faces melted in flames that we fanned. If we could somehow respect each other and like each other even while being the worst people we had ever been, then wow, that was a real friend. He felt like my only real friend in the world because my other friends back home didn’t know how horrible I could really be. Everyone thought I was off doing some good work. When I tried to explain to them that I regularly lost control of my emotions and didn’t even believe in what I was teaching half the time, I felt like they still gave me too much credit for my good intentions.
Everywhere I went I indicted myself. I was fraud in the classroom, a cardboard stand-up of a teacher. And I was a fraud outside of the classroom, a pitiful bully regarded as a caring activist.
As someone who had experienced years of emotional abuse, I saw the person my ex-boyfriend always warned me I was: selfish, uncaring, cruel. I worried that this was the real me, that this had been me all along under a veneer of kindness and empty altruism. My shadows grew.
The shadows rooted deep
I didn’t enter the program thinking I was going to be a hero. I didn’t think I was going to “save the poor kids.” I did think I might save myself, though. I entered the most intense self-improvement project of my life, but I didn’t realize that was what I was doing. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do hard things. I wanted to prove that I was strong, resilient, full of grit. I wanted to come out more confident, able to take on the world. I wanted it to turn me into something more than what I thought I was.
I am a survivor of emotional and sexual abuse. I think I wanted to reclaim some of the power I lost to abuse. I wanted to see myself taking on the role of an authority figure. I wanted to be someone no one would mess with. I beamed with pride when one of my students who had challenged me all year said on a teacher eval in May, “There are two Mrs. Grays. The good side and the bad side. Stay on her good side or prepare to be destroyed.” The fact that he thought I could destroy him delighted me.
My anxiety and constant stress took a toll on me. I was always sick. My health suffered. I ended up in the emergency room several times with horrible pains and concerning heart symptoms. I underwent thousands of dollars of diagnostic tests and procedures. Deep down I hoped they would find something wrong with me that could explain how terrible I felt. They did find a heart issue I had never had before and signs of mysterious digestive distress, but the doctors couldn’t give me definitive answers. Each answer opened more questions. I saw specialist after specialist, chasing answers that were right in front of me all along.
The layers of deep stress, the daily hours of fight-or-flight anxiety, the depression. The body knows. The body warns.
The first year I boomeranged between crying on my way to school and desperately hanging onto the small moment of soaring triumph I could find at the end of the day. The second year was a year of mindless television, getting straight into bed in the afternoons, and wishing time away. I trained myself to feel less and less. At first I thought feeling could be isolated. I’ll feel at home, but I won’t feel at school. Be careful. Not-feeling is a disease that spreads and penetrates every tip of your life. Either you feel everywhere or you feel nowhere. Choose carefully.
Someone learned
From the outside I wasn’t a bad teacher. My students performed well on state assessments, well above the average for our state. My students wrote achingly sweet things on my end-of-the-year evaluations: “she always cares for everyone”; “her class has a professional atmosphere. I love the way we learn”; “if you get a question wrong, you won’t be laught at”; “I like her class because it’s quiet, peaceful, and I can work diligent”; “her class is basic knowledge at first then she teaches things you didn’t know existed.”
“It’s like I have my own space in there,” wrote a boy who had been shuffled from school to school for behavior issues and was later sent to alternative school after he pulled a gun on his aunt.
“I would like to add some graffiti on her wall that says FAMILY.”
I’m still becoming and unbecoming from my two years in the Mississippi Teacher Corps. I don’t know if my students remember anything I taught them or if they remember me. I don’t know if I made any difference in a child’s life. I know that I’m different.
Did I become stronger like I wanted? More confident? Did I reclaim some of the power I lost to abuse? Yes and no. I became stronger in some ways and weaker in others. I left less sure of who I was but more confident that I was strong enough to become who I needed to be. I left feeling less pressure to live a socially impressive life and more interested in finding what felt right to me; I vowed to give no more days to wishing away time.
Some power I took with me, and some I relinquished. I learned to shut off the excruciating playback of moments I’d botched; there was simply no room to do that because there were so many. But I still struggle with looking someone in the eye and really listening to them, which sometimes makes me feel like a shell of myself, like my wings were cut off.
Nearing the end of my first year, I wrote:
Let it not be said that I came here to wither. Let it not be said that I came here to surrender. Let it not be said that I came here with dreams and left with fears.
I’m still learning from the teacher I was. I’m still learning from the person I didn’t want to be. I’m still learning from the person who persisted. And that makes me stronger.
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