Sitting Here

Sometimes when I’m trying to organize my various thumb drives and cloud drives, I stumble across something I’d written and forgotten about.  This is one of those:

Sitting Here

5/22/2012

I’m sitting here proctoring the last final exam of my teaching career at the school for which I’ve worked the past six years.  I was informed not three months ago, that I will not be given a contract for the coming school year, and then I was given a memo listing the reasons for the decision.  The memo is poorly written and riddled with inaccuracies and blatant falsehoods.  And I am so much more than angry.

So I’m sitting here, trying to compose something eloquent and thoughtful.  I want to write something that will mean something to someone.  I want these past six years to have meant something.

Of course, when I force myself to poke my head above this cloud of bitterness I can see many ways in which these last six years have meant a great deal.  There are the students that have reached out to me in their various times of crises.  There are the students who just latched on to me, because for some reason, I’m the one they felt they could.

Then, of course, there is the personal growth.  Each year that one teaches, one becomes a better teacher.  I’ve gotten much stronger in lesson planning, classroom management, and informal assessment.  Even more, I found a brand of Christianity that doesn’t force me to turn my brain off to be a believer.  I can call myself a Christian, again, without feeling guilty about it or ashamed of it.

But this cloud is dense, and frankly, I don’t want to look at the bright side, right now.

People have said to me, “if you’ve touched the life of even one student, doesn’t that make it all worth it?

No.  It really doesn’t.  It’s a romantic idea, and maybe it’s sufficient for some people.  I, however, am more practical than that.  I didn’t go to college for five years, accumulate student loans that’ll never be paid off, and put up with the deluge of bullshit that comes with being a teacher so that one student might benefit by my sacrifice.  I did it because I wanted a life full of meaning and I’m not certain that the one or two students who may have been affected by my presence haven’t been completely cancelled out by the senseless hurtfulness that accompanied my disposal.

Am I being melodramatic?  Am I overlooking the positive to deliberately wallow in the negative?  Probably.  But God damn, I’m tired of looking for meaning in all of this sewage.  It’s exhausting, and frankly, I’m over it.