How I Left Teaching

When I see myself at the front of that classroom eight years ago, I am wearing my favorite skirt—mid-calf, with overlapping splashes of black and magenta and sea-green.  A long silky blouse, bare legs and sandals.  My hair at the time is thick and glossy, dark brown with red and gold highlights.  I’m smiling.  I throw out questions, elicit the students’ answers, cajole them when they’re reticent.  I am so used to this that I come to class with only a vague idea of where we’re at and where we’re going. 

Students have always liked me. I’m older than they are but look their age.  And, like all young people, I’m more beautiful than I realize--which goes a long way with the boys, even the ones in the back of the room, scowling under their baseball caps.  I win them over, I get them talking.  In those days, I’d memorize their names on the first day—all 30 of them.  I’d let my intellect sparkle, but I also knew when to play it down, to let them know I was one of them. 

There was, however, one student in this particular lit class who disturbed me.  He looked about 50, short and stocky with wild wisps of white hair.  He had massive shoulders and a rolling gait that reminded me of a sailor.  Most notably, he was missing his right forearm.  He’d fling the stump around when he talked, oblivious to its effect.  I didn’t know, at first, if I liked him--but I expected to, as sooner or later I liked, even loved, all my students. 

But it turned out that he didn’t like me—or the course, or the novel I’d assigned: A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry.  Set in India in the 1970s, it depicts a long cascade of events that plunges a boy and his uncle deeper and deeper into poverty, always teetering on the edge of annihilation. It’s a risky selection, set in an unfamiliar place and time.  Worse, it’s over 300 pages long.  But the story is sprawling, full of action and dialogue—surely every student could find some version of him or herself in its pages.  

But no.  Charlie would interrupt:  Why are we reading this?  What does this have to do with me?  You’re not teaching us anything.  The younger boys seated around him would titter, sneaking glances at me under their eyelashes.  I’d try to appease him—I hear you; you’re not a fan.  Or I’d try teasing him out of his bad mood:  Oh, c’mon, Charlie, this is a great book!  Yeah, it’s set in India but can’t you relate to the characters, to what they’re going through?  After a while I just tried to ignore him, turn my attention quickly to another student.

His papers were wildly disorganized, a few ideas strung together with no recognizable theme. I was giving him C’s; I figured he was mad.

After 15 weeks, the class staggered to its end, as all classes do.  On the last day I handed out the standard, college-supplied course evaluations.  I waited outside in the hall while they filled them out.  When I came back in the students were talking among themselves.  I caught what must’ve been the tail end of an argument: “Well, at least she smiles—some teachers don’t even do that.” I felt a prickle of anxiety, but also an obsequious gratitude for the student sticking up for me, a “good student,” one of the few who understood what I was getting at.

A few weeks later I received the results of the evaluation, compiled by administrators.  I pulled them out of the envelope with some trepidation, realizing this course had not been my best.  But I was stunned by the comments appended to the numerical data:

     This class was a waste of time

     The teacher was terrible, totally disorganized.

     The novel we read was boring.  Way too long.

     She was the worst teacher I ever had.

Later, I would know how to brace myself for the one or two students in every classroom who would simply despise you and everything you did.  But this was more like eight students, with an additional smattering of those who were lukewarm.  A few students defended me vigorously, but of course it’s the negatives that looped around in my brain, that set me reeling.

In the semesters that followed, I found myself snapping at a group of snarky girls from a wealthy white suburb, furious when students came to class without a first draft for critiques, and overwhelmed with the endless stacks of papers to grade.  It became clear that our new dean was looking to prune out adjuncts he perceived as "dead wood"--more accurately, those he saw as threatening to his authority.  On the last day of spring semester 2012, I received a letter: We will not be renewing your appointment for the fall … .   Three other recipients, all women over 40 with decades of teaching experience, filed a lawsuit. But at the last minute I couldn’t sign on to a process that I knew would drag on, possibly for years—a process in which my vulnerabilities, my failures, would be exposed and exploited.  Although I felt furious and misused, I was also, deep-down, ashamed.

Looking back at that long-ago class, I see myself as naive.  I thought I could get by on my love for my students, for literature, for the give and take of truth-seeking, for the precision and magic of language.  But when another school hired me (for which I was very, very grateful), I became a workhorse, cranking out the same comp class over and over.  I stopped over over-hauling my classes every semester.  I re-used the same unglamorous but serviceable textbook, the same sequence of assignments.  I did it the way teachers are taught to teach—through lesson plans and “research-based pedagogy” and “scaffolding” and “classroom management software,” all the educational buzzwords of the day.  

I’d be lying to say I was unsuccessful.  In those 6 years, I loved my students fiercely. They were the opposite of entitled--humble, almost apologetic--coping with poverty, homelessness, mental illness, hunger, and trauma.  Many thrived on structure, on predictability, on things being minutely spelled out and repeated again and again, both in class and online.  I did everything I could to accommodate their needs.  But I carried the stress of knowing it was not enough. 

In the spring of 2019, on the last day of classes, two students came to me within the space of an hour.  One, who’d been doing his best to fail the class while I refused to let him, told me that, in the last few weeks, he’d attempted suicide twice.  Another, the girl who’d told me I’d inspired her to become a teacher herself, said she’d just had a panic attack so severe they had to call in the public safety officers: “I just wanted to keep everyone away.” 

I’d been teaching the same courses for nearly 20 years.  I was nearly sick with exhaustion.  When it came time to order textbooks for the fall semester, I stared at the screen.