Is it worth it?

About a month ago during winter break, Hilary and I were talking about teaching. She's been interested in going in to teaching for a while and now that graduation is close for her, she's started applying more seriously. She told me about her interview for Teach for America. One of the questions they asked her was what she would do if she was in a job where she felt overwhelmed, her class was out of control, her co-workers refused to work with her or help her, and the administration gave her no support at all. She said that in those circumstances she'd probably quit. I think their question was phrased a little differently, but whatever the exact wording was, it raised a lot of red flags for her. Who asks that in an interview? The only people who would are people who expect that to happen, or at least think it might be a possibility. She'd also heard me talking about how hard teaching was, so she asked if it was worth it, if I'd do it again. I told her no. Every veteran teacher I've talked to has always gone on about how important teaching is and how much of a difference you make, but I've never heard one try to dissuade me from teaching. Honestly, I wish a few of them had tried. It's not for everyone. It really isn't. Telling you how much you're needed really obscures away whether or not the job is right for you. It doesn't matter how much you are needed for a job if you're not happy with it. if someone needs advice about teaching, it really doesn't help to say how necessary it is. Yes, we know it's necessary, but what does the job entail? Is it a job I could be happy with? Is it worth devoting years of my life to a difficult profession? I think part of the fear is that if people knew what they were getting in to, there would be far fewer teachers. But why exactly is that a fear? They have always managed to find someone to fill positions. I guess the worry is that they'll find someone awful to fill a teaching position and that will be bad for the kids. In the end, anyone who tells you how important the job is is really trying to look out for the kids. It's an admirable goal, but it's important for the prospective teacher to realize that the advice is not given with their best interests at heart. I think the idea of veteran teachers is that they went through it and it wasn't so bad, or at least the bad part was over with in a year or two and as long as they can get a novice teacher through the first few years with guilt trips about how important the job is, they'll see that it's not so bad also. It's really selfish in a way. I've spoken with Hilary a few times about teaching and I could tell she didn't really know what the job entailed. No one really does until they have to do it themselves. I sure as hell didn't know and it took me even past my student teaching just to begin to start figuring it out. Hilary could become good at teaching eventually if she persevered at it. Frankly, anyone could if they just kept at it for long enough. But I also know with Hilary's temperament just how hard the first few years would be. It's hard for everyone, but I can tell it would definitely be hard for her. She was just starting to figure it out as well. Was it in her best interest to work at getting a credential and then have to go through even more difficulties teaching? Was it in my best interest? For me, I've already spent several years getting my credential and working on teaching, so the line is murkier, but if I knew three year ago what I know today, I'm not so sure I'd be on the same path.

That was my answer a month ago. Since then, things have been a little smoother. I have started to see what being a veteran teacher must be like. When I am no longer high stakes evaluated every year, when I am no longer pink slipped year after year, when I have my routines down, when I've seen all of the students' tricks, when I've gotten good enough to figure out which battles are worth fighting, when I've found which concepts are tricky for students, when I've accrued enough things worth putting on my walls, when I figure out how to grade quickly, as well as all the other things I haven't figured out that I need yet, the job actually has some pretty nice perks. I get a lot of vacation time. I can't be fired. There is always a market for my job. I can wear whatever I want to work. I have a lot of freedom and agency over how I conduct my day-to-day affairs. The job will always be intellectually satisfying and will never get boring. Some of these features are more valuable than others (such as the never being fired one - and all you have to do is put up with the guarantee of being fired for a few years straight), but they are all benefits in some way that wouldn't necessarily be a part of another job. The security that comes with being a veteran teacher is really worth something. I see Steven stress every day about his company getting a bad earnings report one quarter and firing him. I think he stresses a little unnecessarily, but I think most people worry about their jobs at one point or another. A job where you don't have to do that is pretty sweet. Of course, it's not worth it if you're miserable every day of the job, but I've gotten to the point where I'm not miserable every day. Eventually I think I'll be miserable even less. I am at the point where I have the general idea of what I'm supposed to be doing down. Now all I have to do is refine it.

But that brings us back to the point from earlier: is it worth it? Maybe one day I'll forget just how miserable the firsth alf of this year was, but right now it's pretty fresh in my mind. There are a lot of hard realities I've had to face teaching. My classroom management skills were awful. They are still awful, but I'm starting to get the hang of it a little. I've gotten better enough to realize that next year I will still be bad at it. Perhaps the year after that I will begin to be better, but it's still going to take a while for me to set everything up the way I want it. One of the other hard realities I've had to face is that my parents really didn't know a lot about discipline. I told my mom about how one of my students stole some tape from me and I was going to call his parents about it. She said "it's just tape. Let it go." I write a fair amount, but I'm honestly not sure how to put into words how much that flippant little phrase hurt me. It's hard to see someone you respect and have almost put on a pedestal make a mistake, and a serious one, and not even realize they were wrong. I felt like that in the beginning of the year and had to find out the hard way just how wrong that was. It was a very painful lesson, one that left me feeling like crap every day I walked out of that classroom, knowing how powerless I was and how I didn't know what I was doing. But it was a lesson I did learn in the end. I never realized until then that I was treating my students the way I had been raised. My parents left me to figure out what I should and shouldn't do. They didn't really force me to do anything. In some ways, this left me an independent person who had the freedom to choose the right path. In a lot of ways it was a good thing. I always felt like my judgement was good, as I was counted on to make pretty much all of my own decisions about my conduct. But kids are kids. They can't be counted on to make every decision correctly. There are some things that I decided weren't important somewhere along the line that really were in the end. My parents pretty much never made me clean my room. That wasn't important to me and it wasn't a battle they felt like fighting. I know my mom didn't like how messy my room was, but she left me to make my own decisions. She focused on how good I was in school instead. But organization is a skill, a skill you have to learn. Cleanliness is too, and kids can't always be counted on to realize how important it is. As I grow older, I'm starting to realize how bad clutter and mess can get when you have adult sized possessions and (this has been a great horror) papers, many of which are important and need to be saved somewhere.

I don't mean to put the burden or blame on my parents for how I turned out. For the most part, I really like how I turned out, but now that I'm finally out of school and out from under my parents' wing, I'm starting to notice how many important life skills I just don't have. Teaching brought that home to me a little faster than I think it otherwise would have come, but I think I would have figured out eventually that some of the things people have always said are important that I casually brushed off, might actually be important. I'm probably a more thoughtful individual since I've had a chance to realize this for myself instead of just doing as I was told and making my bed or cleaning my room or any of the other things kids are usually ordered to do by their parents, but it's a tough task to learn all these simple things that most people take for granted that you know. I don't really know how to sweep, mop, or vacuum. I'm not sure what a duster is supposed to accomplish (doesn't it just move dust around? How is that cleaner?). The vast array of cleaning utensils boggles my mind. When I first used a Lysol wipe, I thought it was magic. And I could come up with similar lists for cooking as well. I didn't know how to cut veggies, which things cooked the fastest, what temperatures different meats needed to be baked at, how a microplanar is different from a cheese grater (actually I still don't know that one. I have high hopes for figuring it out one day), how to clean a dirty pan, etc. So to tie this ramble back in to my point from earlier, I left for college not knowing all that much outside of what was absolutely necessary for school. I graduated college not a whole lot better in terms of practical skills. I had learned many of the rudimentary skills of cooking, but I was very lucky to have a convenient situation (the coops) and a good friend (Susan) to help me out. But even though I was lacking in all of these basic things, I never thought it was my parents' responsibility or that my mom had done anything less than being a perfect parent. In all honesty, she was an excellent parent in so many ways, but it wasn't until she made that comment about ignoring that student stealing from my desk that I realized she wasn't perfect, that there were things she missed. Then I saw all that struggling and suffering I'd gone through in the past few months because I wasn't prepared for what was awaiting me, and I had an idea of why I wasn't as prepared as I could have been. I almost broke down right there when I heard my mom make a comment consistent with beliefs I used to hold about discipline. It's so hard to shed beliefs you have about the world. You don't question where they came from. As long as they've always worked in your experience they must be fine, and it usually takes a lot of evidence otherwise to prove to yourself that they don't work. I had by that point had months of experience disproving that. And of course, at first you don't know exactly what it is that you're doing wrong, which belief you hold that is clearly not working. It takes a long while to figure it out and another long while to figure out what it is you should be doing differently. So after going through all that and coming to painful conclusions, I saw my mom espousing those same beliefs. She never realized that they were wrong. I saw where my beliefs had come from and I saw that my mom had steered me wrong. I knew from before that there were some things she was misguiding about, but I had never seen her be completely wrong. Since then, I've seen a lot of the ways in which she is fallible. She tries to convince you that she's right instead of just telling you. She doesn't ever tell you you have to do something, so she cajoles and reasons and when she really wants something, she manipulates. My brother's car is getting old and my mom wants him to get a new one, but he wants to keep it until the things is completely unsalvageable. It is getting to be a bit of a wreck, but it does still drive. The door doesn't open, most of the radio and dashboard buttons have fallen off, and it has more than 100,000 miles on it, but it does drive. My mom doesn't want to order Tony around, but she still wants him to do what she wants. She keeps offering arguments for why he should choose to get a new car himself, many of which are completely wrong. She tried the "girls won't like you with a beat up car" front. People do judge you based on what you drive sometimes. A first impression is important. This was her first argument and I think it's the real reason she wants him to stop driving that car. When Tony brushed that off, she moved on to the safety argument. Does she really think the airbags won't go off because the car is old? Or that the seatbelts won't work? That's not exactly the first things to fail. But that's what she was telling Tony when he was driving us around. It's untrue and she doesn't really believe it (though I'm sure she thinks she does), and that's what she said to Tony the whole time we were in the car when last we visited. During dinner, Tony got into a small argument with me. It was nothing big. We fight a lot when we're together actually because he has a very different view of the world and we occasionally butt heads over it. Two days later he called apologizing and was hoping I wasn't upset. I could tell my mom had been harping at him over those two days. He sounded so miserable. I wasn't even mad. That's just how our interactions go sometimes. He needs to get out of that house. I don't know how to tell him he does either. Next time I see him I'll try to bring it up.

When I think about it, a lot of the realizations I've made have been good things. It is important for me to see my mom's flaws as well as her strengths. It is important for me to grow a backbone and get over telling people what to do. I have grown a lot as a person by teaching. I don't know that it was the best way to learn. It certainly wasn't the easiest way, but it might have been the fastest. So again, we come back to "is it worth it?" And whatever answer I come up with to that question, will that still be my answer in a year? Two years? Ten? I don't know if I can answer this question now. One thing I really regret is that I never tried anything else. I never tried going into the job market with no idea what job I wanted or what I'd be required to do if I was hired. I never sent out mass resumes. Frankly, I took the simple path. I honed in on one of the few jobs I was even remotely familiar with and did the appropriate actions to follow through with it. There are millions of jobs out there, many of which I think I would be fine at, but I don't even know they exist. They're the jobs that happen behind the scenes that no one ever hears about, like Susan's. There's no major in college that prepares you for them. I wish I had gone into the "real" job market - the one where you're not set on a particular path in a particular direction by schooling before you're even on the hunt for a job. I wish I could compare teaching to some other job. Steven says all jobs are hard, but you never really understand until you experience it for yourself. I want to experience what another job is like, but it's not really reasonable for me to do that now. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Maybe I can try for a part time job in summer. Until then, I don't know if I can answer whether or not this job is worth it. A lot of the perks, I can't really appreciate without comparison. Maybe the autonomy my job allows isn't important to me but how will I know unless I get a job without much autonomy? Maybe the downsides of teaching outweigh the perks. If that's the case, then it really isn't worth it. Maybe I can't appreciate the perks now because I don't know how awful it would be without them. I do know this: if I had to do it over again, I'd do it different. I really didn't know what I was getting into with teaching. I needed to experience the world more and grow up a little more before even considering it. I wish I had braved the uncertainty and gone hunting for a job right after college. Perhaps one day I will give it a try. Perhaps I'll come back to the teaching profession afterwards. I just feel like right now, I don't have a lot of information and I made choices in my life that left me ill-prepared and ill-informed. Is it worth it? At this point, maybe. Then again, maybe not. I will keep working through the year. I'll give next year a try too. I think a third year would be pretty informative as well, but I'm not ready to think that far ahead. For now I need to put these thoughts on the back burner and deal with the present one day at a time. This is a question I'll revisit periodically, but for right now, I just can't answer it.