Back To (High) School?

Five weeks ago, during my first week as a high school teacher, one of my students (let's call him Student X) pretended that he couldn't hear me when I tried to make small talk with him.

"Huh?" he said, with a smirk on his face. I repeated my question.

"Huh?" he said, again, and the second time, I understood what was going on. I was on the butt end of the joke.

I replayed that interaction over and over in my head for the rest of the week. There's something even more humiliating about missing the joke and not knowing you're being made fun of than simply being called a name straight to your face.

Moments like that have admittedly made me doubt my decision to join Teach For America straight out of college and throw myself into the broken and confusing system that is American public schooling with too much idealism and too little preparation. I have always struggled with wanting to be liked—by teachers, by classmates, by teammates, by friends, and now, I could see it happening with my own students.

In my junior year of college, I served as co-president for Princeton's Club Tennis team. My first semester as president was a dream—we won nearly every tournament we played, practice attendance was the highest I'd ever seen it, and people seemed to like each other and want to be around each other. When everything was going well, it felt like I had been born to be club tennis president.

In the spring semester, tough decisions I had to be a part of (like who to take to the national tournament) and interpersonal fallouts turned practice, formerly the best part of my days, into the worst part. People who had originally been thrilled to have me as co-president stopped saying hello at practice or would roll their eyes when they found out they had to be in the same car as me for a tournament drive. The effort I put into making the club run smoothly didn't change: I was still staying up until midnight every night to book extra courts a week in advance to make sure we had enough court space for the following week, and I was still spending my free time arranging AirBnBs and tournament lineups. But the joy in the position was gone—because the recognition and praise was gone.

I completed my term as co-president but stepped down from the board at the end of my junior year, never showing my face at a club tennis practice or tournament again. I kept a few friendships with people I trusted, but still, I'd stopped wanting to play the sport that I'd played for my entire life, and I took a 10 month break from even touching a racket.

So, if losing praise and esteem in front of a small group of people affected me so much, why in the world would I think I could handle being a high school special education teacher at a Title I public school?

Recently, I had an hour and a half long phone call with an old friend from club tennis. I told her about all the ins and outs of my new job, the four classes I teach every day, how much scaffolding my instruction requires to meet the needs of my diverse groups of students, the 12 kids on my caseload, and the complete lack of recognition for all of it. So, she asked me, how do you sustain that?

The short answer that I gave her was, faith.

The longer answer is that becoming a Christian helped me to see how it was my own selfishness that had driven my desire to be "good." My faith has completely changed how I view the way I handled the whole situation with club tennis. Yes, people may have said some pretty nasty things or behaved in hurtful ways. And yes, even though we were a "team," everyone was fighting for their own glory. Everyone wanted to play in the big matches, to be the one to win it for the team, or the one calling the shots. But at the end of the day, everyone was looking out for themselves, including me.

My whole orientation toward the club was deeply selfish, because my whole orientation toward life was. I wanted to be a "good" president and a "good" person. I wanted to be liked and praised for my tennis and for my organization skills. My enjoyment of being president depended entirely on how other people treated me, meaning it was not out of pure, selfless love for the team that I served them. It was all self-serving: all to feed my own self-image and esteem.

This is not to say that I didn't care at all for the people on the team or for the sport. The point, more largely, is that my deepest motivation, the one that sustained me, was self-serving. True love and giving should continue regardless of whether you receive, but I crumbled when I stopped feeling appreciated.

Now, as a public school teacher, I get probably fifty times more complaints than I do compliments. The lessons I put hours into creating are met with groans and heads on desks, questions of "do we have to do this?" and "why do I have to be in school anyway?" If I continue to serve myself, I'll burn out of this job within a couple months. If I serve God instead, I'll value the good that I'm doing over the good that is being done to me.

I also am not saying that now that I'm a Christian, this kind of work is easy. I had to have a real heart check this past week to reevaluate my motivation and make sure my heart posture toward my work was right. My boyfriend Aiden noticed that my words toward my work were gradually becoming more and more negative, the silly stories about things my kids say becoming less frequent and complaints about my certification classes or all the observations I have to do were beginning to take up more conversation space. I'd begun to complain about the loss of "my time" as if I owned it, as if I were entitled to "self-care time" as a birthright.

A passage from a The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis that convicted me recently:

"You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption 'My time is my own.' Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to his religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright." [Context: in The Screwtape Letters, a fictional "senior devil" writes letters to a "junior devil" on how to corrupt humans and bring them over to their side, rather than God's.]

What Aiden helped me see was that I was losing sight of my "why." I was serving myself first before serving these children—more upset about loss of "my" free time than thrilled about the opportunity to show love to these kids or proud of the ways this job has already made me tougher.

It's still hard, and probably always going to be at least a little hard, to stand in front of apathetic teenagers and try to convince them why what they're learning in geometry or biology (the two classes I was assigned to teach) should matter to them. But every so often, I see them get excited about something I'm teaching. We used microscopes in biology class this past week, and for the first time, one of my usually too-cool-for-school boys asked me for more work—he wanted to see more samples under the microscope because he thought they were so cool, and asked if we could have another class period of microscope time. Those are the moments I want to lean into.

Circling back to the beginning of this post, if you remember Student X, I found out a few weeks ago that he was still grieving the recent loss of his mom. My heart toward him immediately softened, and I finally forgave him for how he'd embarrassed me in the first week. Learning more about him has been a sobering reminder that my selfish desire to be liked by all my students got in the way of my compassion for him, and kept me from giving grace to a kid who needs it.

My classroom!

On a different note, I apologize for such a long gap between posts! For months, writing another blog post has been on my weekly to-do list, but I kept telling myself I had to do my thesis or teacher prep work or whatever else first, and I stopped writing. I felt a strong compulsion to write while I was driving back to my apartment recently, and I had to choose to do this before doing some of my teacher prep work in order to make it happen, but I'm very glad that I did. I hope to keep posting more regularly again now. As always, thank you for reading! :)