Getting your first job right after college is scary. Who will hire someone who has no experience outside of internship or student-teaching? One just spent 4 years (or more) preparing for a job and now it’s up to that person to get the job. And it isn’t always easy.
So, when I had a chance to interview at Walther Lutheran High School for an English teaching position, I was thrilled. I loved working with the English teacher whom I had observed earlier, and it was a good job to start with. The school was small, close to my house in Bellwood, and I was used to the Lutherans. I liked going to chapel and having the prayer. Right across from my first classroom right upstairs was the small chapel with its cozy feel and stained-glass windows.
I don’t remember the interview, which is strange since most of the time interviews are very hard for teachers. Often they are multiple people peppering you with many questions as the interviewers look over your resume. I was assigned the room at the end of the hall by the stairs at the front of the school (across from the Chapel and overlooking the parking lot). I walked into a sour-looking room with chairs hooked to the desks and chalkboards. However, I still had that clean bubble of a first-year teacher wrapped tightly around me and I immediately asked if I could get the room painted. They said I could paint it, so my husband and I spent a day whitewashing the walls. It did look better and I kept my bubble intact.
I found out that I was allegric to chalk pretty quickly. Who thought this was a good idea for classrooms, anyway? Yes, it erases, but the dust is a mess, no one wants to clean the erasers, and you get chalk all over your clothes. My fingers would tingle and then go numb as I handled the stuff. Dry erase boards have their issues, too, but I’ll take them any day.
BTW
I spent several hours covering dingy billboards with bright-colored, expensive paper and making colorful scenes for students to enjoy. I put up posters, decorations, and learning tools, and stocked the room with good books. There was no doubt that I was excited about being a teacher.
I was to be the Sophomore English teacher, including those Freshmen bright enough to move up a level. I would also teach American Mosaic (a diversity in literature elective) and a Folklore/Mythology class that was actually a pretty awesome topic to study. Well, it was for me.
My department chair was a wizened, veteran school teacher; you know the kind, with 30 years of teaching under her belt and the tough looks of a stereotypical coach. I remember going to her seeking guidance for the folklore and mythology class since I didn’t have much of a background in this. She told me to “google” it in so many terms. I was dumbfounded.
The truth is, they don’t teach you how to teach literature. How do you structure lessons? I did it for student-teaching, I suppose, but those kids actually did the homework. What if they don’t have a clue what you’re talking about because they didn’t bother to do any homework? What then?
Someone who wasn’t a teacher must have designed the desks in my room and put me through a living hell that first year. The chairs swung back and forth and I can’t tell you how many times I would turn to the class only to be looking at the backs of students’ heads. I put the chairs in rows, and the students would move them to where they wanted. I asked them not to, they did it anyway. Some boys in the back rows thought it was funny to take the staples out of my bulletin boards one at a time. I finally grew so tired of it that I sadly stood in front of the class and quietly explained to them how much I had worked to make the class a nice place to be, including 3 hours per bulletin board, only to have people destroy them in minutes. That was the one time that they did show some remorse. But only once…
At first, I would use the book to help with questions and try to get a discussion going. However, the students would come into class and completely ignore me and talk as loud as they could with each other. Mind you, there were upwards of 35 students in a room at a time, so the noise was deafening. I would have to scream at the top of my lungs, waving my arms like a crazy person, to get their attention and have them be quiet for the lessons. There were always a few that wouldn’t shut up no matter what I did or said. Students would tell me to my face that I’m a horrible teacher and they wish they had the teacher from last year. They would tell me they don’t want to be in my class and one student blatantly said, “I don’t care about what you say,” when I asked him to sit down so we could start class. When I asked for respect in a respectful way, they told me I didn’t deserve it. And I wasn’t supposed to take it personally.
When they snapped at me, I would tell them to get a degree in teaching first, and then they can critique me. Maybe grow up some? I didn’t say that though. I would try new tactics to get the students to do their work, which is what I ultimately cared about. I wanted them to learn something whether they liked it or not. They wanted to strip me down to the lowest possible stance and then do whatever they wanted to do. Then, when they are caught doing the wrong thing, blame it on me because I’m the teacher and should be controlling them. It’s quite the rollercoaster ride.
I especially had issues with a senior boy who disrespected me every chance he got. He wouldn’t sit in his seat and would talk whenever he wanted to. He never did the homework or participated in class. He was the one who said he didn’t care about what I had to say when I asked him to sit down. When I wrote him up for that, he told the Dean that I was the problem and that I should leave him alone. Really?
The Dean arranged a meeting between the boy and myself with the Dean there to help figure out how we could get along better. The boy outright told the Dean he didn’t respect me and he didn’t feel that he had to. I was always asking him to do things like sit in his seat and answer questions, and I would mark him late if he showed up late. The Dean reiterated that these were things I was supposed to do. This Dean was clever and experienced. He reminded the young man that his mother is a police officer and if some random man talked back to her and disrespected her, then he wouldn’t like it. I was no different; I had a job to do and he was standing in my way. He was slightly more respectful after this talk. He isn’t the only student that felt it was okay to speak to me any way that he/she felt like, not understanding the idea of respecting one’s elders or authority.
I had a senior girl take my elective course and when I insisted that she pay attention and get some work done, she told me she hated the class and didn’t want to be there. I just remember staring at her, thinking she has a lot of nerve considering it was an elective course. You ELECTED to be here. If it’s not what you want, then why are you in the class? That made no sense to me. But then, the saying goes that the one thing people are willing to pay for and not get is an education.
I would write and grade these elaborate quizzes to get the students to at least listen to me in class, if not read on their own at home. I would spend all day at school fighting for them to pay attention and learn something, then I would go home and pass out for about 2 hours, eat something for dinner with my husband, and then work on preparing for the next day until almost midnight when I would just go to bed. I’d do that every day. I would be so exhausted that I would cry all the time, my anxiety so terrible that one day on the street to school I pulled over and called a friend of mine sobbing, telling her that I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t go into that building again with little to no passion left to fight the students who thought it was funny when I got chalk on my butt or to write that I lick assholes on the wall in pen, and even more horrible things on the desks–that I would have to clean behind them. I learned to concentrate and work through any distractions, which actually got me into trouble.
I was sitting at my desk while they were working on a quiz. I’m sure I was grading desperately or working on the next super hard quiz. I started to notice that there were giggles every now and then, but they were silly all the time so I didn’t think much of it. That is until the Superintendent came flying into my room and went to the seats by the windows and asked, “Who threw the books out the window?”
I’m horrified, of course, because it’s my class and I’m responsible, and my students were taking the books I had on the built-in shelves underneath the windows and throwing the heavy dictionaries out the window. The giggles were when I didn’t notice and they thought they’d gotten away with it.
A visitor to the school had been walking from the parking lot to the back of the school, underneath my classroom, when a heavy dictionary had come flying from the 2nd floor, just missing her. She could have been seriously hurt and the Superintendent was furious with the students and with me. I wasn’t trying to ignore them; I was trying to get some work done, but they weren’t the kind that could work quietly without a monitor who was closely watching their childish behavior. They did apologize to the shaken woman and they were really sorry. I just remember feeling like a failure at what I was trying to accomplish, but I wasn’t going to avoid the responsibility for what could have happened to the woman walking beneath the windows, and what did happen to my books. The Principal rattled off email after email telling me how incompetent I was, and I took it all, promising that it wouldn’t happen again and it didn’t.
I went through it all. An angry parent blamed me for her child not doing well in my class. I tried to explain that he wasn’t completing the work, but it was my fault that he wasn’t doing his homework or passing any of the tests because he didn’t bother to study. She came flying into my classroom, screaming at me and telling me how horrible I was and that her child wasn’t learning anything. I tried to explain to her what I expected of him and what he can do to do better in the class. She continued to blame me for everything going wrong as he sat there silently. The Dean rushed into the room at this point and sat with us. I guess someone had gone to the office and reported that a parent was yelling at me and he had come to help out. He did get her to be calmer and we were able to talk things through, but I was even more mortified when tears started streaming down my face in the middle of all of this. I didn’t want to cry and I tried very hard not to, but the tears came anyway and I was so embarrassed. I didn’t want her to think she had hurt me because she shouldn’t have that power. Anger and frustration cause pain for someone like me and I cry to express these emotions. If I’m hurt, I don’t tend to cry but go quiet and contemplative. So, I try to hide the tears but they came anyway.
She ended up leaving feeling okay about things, but I remember just feeling attacked. The student felt self-righteous because his mom had come and tore me a new one in front of him and the class I had in there at the time. His haughty attitude would affect things for the rest of the year. Later, I saw him in the neighborhood and he came running up to me so excited, “Mrs. Brown! I can’t believe it. It’s really you.” I stared at him, feeling the frustration bubbling up inside me. He was acting like he was seeing a celebrity he admired in real life, his smile a mile wide. I didn’t understand how he could be so positive when things were so negative with his mother and me. I was completely confused and it was hard for me to act happy to see him, but I hope I did.
I spent two years trying to get used to fighting students to do work, cafeteria duty, grading furiously, etc. I also learned to love teaching literature in my own way and sharing great lessons about things like Urban legends, folklore from many different cultures, diverse cultures, and how they view stories. I was supposed to coach girls basketball, but I was too weary to do so and they understood.
When we signed students up for classes for the next year, students flocked to my table to try to get my classes. I guess I turned out to be okay and I would go on to teach at different schools. I’m not sure why I had to traipse the course of Hell to get to what would be Heaven, but I guess it’s more important where you end up…Right?
And Yet...She Persisted 