#or the fact that i was living in a homophobic antiatheist town as a gay atheist

[dino-nugget7]

TW: This post is going to be about my experiences as a teacher. This is going to include discussions of covid, child abuse, workplace negligence, and sucidality.

Well, got back on this lovely little hellsite for the first time in about 2 years yesterday. I left here around the time that I had decided to leave teaching. I talked a bit back then about how horrifically oppressive the school system is to students (which is still something I'm pissed about) But I wasn't ready to talk about a lot of the other aspects of the system that disturbed me. I thought I had bipolar disorder because I went through a severe depression and the meds I was put on to cope with that put me through a manic episode which was in some ways scarier than the depressive episode. I haven't had an episode in either direction since leaving. I mention this so you understand how fucked my situation was even if you don't read any farther. I do hope someone reads farther though even though its gonna be a depressing read because I need people to know how horrific it is to work in education, especially rural education.

So here's an exhaustive list of every fucked up aspect of my time as a teacher:

1. Within the first few weeks of being a teacher, a student confided in me about being beaten at home. Of course, I reported it and a few days later the caseworker assigned to that student informed my colleagues and I that the state did find evidence of violence against the student but that it was leaving the student in the home "because the student was 17 and had a history of drug use so there would be no foster families willing to take him." The student was beaten again to the point of ending up in the hospital and the state locked up his stepfather for a few months but left him in the home again with his mother who had let said abuse happen. This is not the worst case of a student experiencing violence at home and not being removed after we reported it that I witnessed. Just the first. I was powerless to help any of them because the safety net they were supposed to have outside of us when horrific shit happens, just...wasn't there.

2. As discussed before I left, I realized that even though I happened to have liked school when I was in, its fucked up how micromanaged every second of the day is for students and how they have no say over what they are learning about. Its fucked up that they are trained to be blindly obedient and forced to stay in spaces and interact with people that cause them suffering.

3. This is pretty specific to the fact that I was in a student self-paced rural alternative school but I was the only science and health teacher both years, the math teacher my first year and the art teacher my second. In a class period with 16 students, it was common for students to be working on 7 different courses. Which would have been fine, I had experience in college running that class structure, but I had no textbooks, no lab materials unless I bought them, very few math and art supplies, and I had to make all of my lesson materials and all 20 curricula from scratch because the curricula I had been handed by my predecessor had been written in 1993 and never updated. Between teaching, meetings, grading, curricula building, classroom upkeep and lab setup I was there every day from 5 am to 7pm at least and often also came in for a few hours on Saturdays.

4. When Covid hit and we all went remote, I spent every day staring at my own face on a webcam for 7 hours because none of the students showed up at all to any of their classes despite us calling the parents we could reach every day and sending emails every day. A few students completed a couple of assignments early on over email but even that didn't happen after a while. I didn't blame them, I know a lot of them were trapped in hell being stuck at home and the rest considered school hell but it fucks with your psyche to spend 35 hours a week forced to stare at yourself on a screen on the slimmest chance someone will show up for 2 months straight.

5. On the last day of school my first year, a parent called and yelled at me about her daughter not getting a science credit and having a 10% in my class. She claimed I never reached out. I pointed out that her daughter refused to do work in my class long before lockdown despite every effort on my part, which she(the parent) knew about based on previous conferences we'd had about this very behavior and forwarded her every email I sent her over the course of lockdown with work she could have done and links to my class zoom meeting if she'd wanted face-to-face help and pointed out every phone call we made. She went to my principal to demand an extension for her daughter into the summer which my principal granted so I got to spend Even More Time staring at my own face because Surprise surprise, her daughter still didn't show up or complete any assignments but I didn't recieve further berating from that parent about it at least.

6. When we went back to in person teaching I was the only adult in the building who took the mask mandate seriously so my classroom was the only one where students were wearing masks at all and I had to fight them tooth and nail about it because my roommate's son was immunocompromised and could not afford to get sick but because I was the only teacher fighting that battle, it got harder and harder instead of easier and a lot of students I had built good relationships with the previous year started to hate me for being so strict and I had to go get that test where they shoved a swab all the way up into your sinus cavity every single week until the vaccine came out. When I opened up to my colleagues about the stress this was causing me and why I cared so much (which I really didn't feel like I should have had to justify in the first place), they told me to "relax about it, kids aren't even the ones dying," entirely ignoring that I was in direct contact with a kid who could have, in fact, died from it. This was the straw that caused me to put in my resignation.

7. All of the above put me in a mental state where I had to call a suicide hotline and take an emergency few days off work because I couldn't physically get myself out of bed. I got put on those meds that made me manic but they take a few weeks to kick in at all and I contractually could not take that long off and couldn't have afforded to do so anyways so still in full-blown suicidal depression, my first day back was Parent Teacher Conference Night, which is exhausting and terrible at the best of times. My principal knew I was mentally unwell and had told me if I needed any accommodation as I readjusted to let her know so I asked if I could sit out conferences or at the very least have someone else in the room with me since the school was so small that every teacher had every student. She said no, that it was a privacy issue (which was untrue because we did whole-staff parent meetings All The Time for students with particularly concerning behaviors and because again we all taught everyone and had daily staff meetings about student progress and concerns so we all knew everything about everyone but even so she could have been the one to sit with me) I pointed all of this out and she told me, "Well being a teacher isn't about you, you have to put the students above yourself." When I had been doing that nonstop for two years to the point that I was in the mental hole I was in. I was in such a fucked up place that a lot of the parents noticed it and tried to check in on me as I started falling asleep or forgot what I was saying midsentence.

8. When I did my exit interview at the end of the year my principal told me that I was a great teacher and she hoped I'd return to the field someday even if it was in a different setting because students deserved someone who was constantly the voice in the room advocating for them even when their own parents and other teachers stopped doing so. This was the first meeting I ever had where I was told I was a good teacher rather than being constantly told what i should be improving on as I drowned trying to even lay a foundation for myself.

Despite everything it still breaks my heart to realize it will never be healthy for me to go back to teaching even if I was in a district with better supports because of how much trauma I've been left with and because of how jaded about the entire system i am. I loved the teaching part of my job. I loved those moments where students showed me projects they were proud of and when they finally understood concepts that had them stuck. I loved empowering students to make positive decisions and to come out of their shells in my class. I loved when I managed to create lessons that hit that learn something-have fun sweet spot. I loved when I was able to let students incorporate their real interests into what we were learning or even let them be the experts on a topic. I still have art students gave me. I know despite it grinding me down to a husk of myself, I was good teacher and I could have eventually been an excellent one. Its true that Teaching is more than a job, its a calling. But I'm no use to anyone dead.