life

the evil teacher name comes from the same student who told me he was going to break my knees with a sledgehammer to prevent me from leaving them... he thought i also created evilteachers.com. unfortunately it wasn't available as a blog domain, but it's not bad for a signature, right? and no, there's no actual evilteachers.com (yet). I checked.

Just thinking today... being an adult sucks. Actually I wasn't just thinking that today. There's this passage in a book I read in middle school, "A Separate Peace" where the character talks about how everyone has got a moment in time that they get stuck in, and no matter how old they get or what they do, they live the rest of their life in that moment. If I misrepresent that section for those of you who happen to've read this recently, forgive me, I haven't read the book in 10 years, but this is how I remember it. Anyway, I've lived in mild fear of getting stuck in a really bad moment since then. And then there was this quarter in college where someone I was connected to died every week, usually on a Thursday. It was possibly the worst time in my life to that point so far, and it certainly was for a lot of people I loved and cared about. And ever since then, every time I get at all depressed, I feel like I sort of boomerang mentally back to that time (or sometimes to the end of senior year, bad for a whole different set of mental health-challenging ways). Life sucks and it just doesn't end. I know a lot of you will make fun of me for this, but an equal number of you are ardent fans as well, so my parallel is Buffy, 6th season. In every season there's some big bad evil that she and her plucky friends get together to defeat against the odds, but that season, the big bad is just life. Getting a job, paying bills, getting through school, etc. Life just sucks throughout the season. I'm kind of in that space right now. I'm having paperwork issues with the school district, which may or may not lead to me having to temporarily stop teaching. I just blew up/had a breakdown at my principal, I'm losing all my kids next week (with whom my relationship is the only reason I even get myself together each day to wake up and go to work), and I'm violently sick (as is Ems), even if I valiantly pretended for 3 hours today that I wasn't to get myself together to go do errands. And that's just the beginning. I'm just not very good at this adult business, and it's not a phase that you can just go through and bounce back. Being an adult is kind of a forever deal (unless you're far more depressed than I am... this is just a getting out the blues kind of rant, but I don't sing or play guitar, so... this is the whining of the 21st century. considerably less melodic and appealing than the blues... sorry). Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't go back to middle school for all the money in the world. It was miserable and awful and watching what my kids go through each day just reminds me of it (and what I went through is NOTHING compared to what they go through). But a break to just go back to high school... or the beginning of sophomore year of college. Or Capetown, third year. Brazil was kind of like that, but it was so short and in a lot of ways it just kind of complicated my life even more (not necessarily in a bad way, just... more complicated).

Anyway, I think I'm leaving teaching next year. I keep thinking about a conversation I had with O., who was my supervisor at an after-school children's center I worked at in Chicago, when I told him I was going to be a teacher. He told me that my personality was perfect for working with the kids, but if I ever left it it was going to be because of the bureaucracy or incompetent administration rather than anything the students put me through. And I hate to say it, but he's right. I feel incredibly guilty, but I just feel caught. The system is set up so that the kids are failed, constantly; me leaving in mid-February is a perfect example. I don't want to leave, because I want them to know they have someone to count on that will be there for them every day, but if I'm in a position where I can't even do that, where I can't even be there to provide what support I can, what's the point? Of course the kids are failing... we're failing them. I can't stop thinking about this today. No matter what else I do it just keeps going around and around in my head.

This entire system is a huge cycle of failure. In my grad class we had a discussion about whether the education system would ever improve under capitalism. It had been a long time since I thought about it in those terms, but it was a discussion that if anything just made me feel even more depressed about the future. The world is just going to keep failing these kids. And I can't even hold it together to be with them anymore, and even if I could, it's not worth it because the system won't even let me do that.

I PROMISE next post I'll have something cheerful to say. I actually got a lot of really sweet adorable Valentine's Day cards from my kids, but of course getting them on Thursday (Wed. was a snow day- that's cheerful!) they just made me more upset that I wasn't going to be with the kids who gave them to me anymore... like C., my sweetheart that came in the middle of the year that I posted about before ("smart boys like smart girls")- although that's actually not related, he's moving to Florida...