They will come in with their chins lowered, with their eyes lowered, with their mouths in straight lines of apathy or exhaustion or both. They will be wearing unlaced sneakers, tongues poking atop jeans tight at the ankles, logo-d Polos, high-waisted yoga pants. They will come in with books and without books, with pencils and without pencils, but they will all wield phones. They will find their seats and talk to their friends, their minds full of everything but your subject, their mouths full of the conversation they just had in the hallway about whose boyfriend was kissing whose ex-girlfriend’s best friend. All of them will wait. They will wait for the clock to run around in the circle that will mark an hour, that will mark the end of your class, the beginning of lunch, the conclusion of the school day, the start of the real, important lives they hold outside of the four walls of your classroom.
The bell will ring and they will stare at you, lending you the show of their attention. Look closely enough and you will see the radar waves they will emit in your direction. They will be probing for signs of greenness, signs of weakness. Within the first 60 seconds of you speaking they will know if you’re for real or if you’re faking it, and you’ll be faking it. The newness will emanate from you like Acqua Di Gio wafting through the freshmen hallway and they will look at each other and smirk and know. A boy in the back slouched low in his seat with enormous feet tucked into enormous white, gleaming sneakers, with thick headphones encircling his neck, will shout something that will seem innocuous enough. Something like, “I love that color on you, fam!” and you will laugh along with your students and try to tell yourself you’re in on the joke and wonder all night if you should have done something beyond smiling dumbly at that boy as he slouched lower in his seat.
They will come in some days and you will be certain they’re mocking you. You’ll give them something empowering, some activity designed to speak to the contents of their character, to touch their very souls, and they will groan in complaint. The buzzing of teenage conversation will crescendo like a rightward-turned volume knob. A seed of anger will root itself into the pit of your stomach and blossom until your mouth is open and you’re yelling, lecturing the class the way all the teachers you hated in high school lectured their classes. “We thought you were chill, Mr. G,” the boy with the headphones will say. You thought you were chill, too. Mostly, you won’t know what you are.
By November, exhaustion will press down upon your shoulders. You will arrive at school well before the sun comes up and go home in the dark and seek your bed and close your eyes and find sleep before you even knew you were looking for it. Your spouse will attempt to counsel you. Teaching is harder than you thought, she will say. But instead of admitting this obvious truth, you will lie to her. Not much harder, you’ll retort, willing yourself to smile. You will drag yourself to school each morning like a newly-minted member of the undead and count the days to Christmas break.
One unassuming day a girl from fourth block will shuffle into your classroom during your lunch, the only silent time of your day. She will ask if it’s okay, mister, if she just sits for awhile and talks to you, and you’ll want her to leave because you need just 20 minutes of alone time to prepare yourself to survive the rest of your day. But you will tell her that she can stay, of course she can stay. The girl will put her face in her hands, her hoop earrings catching the fluorescent lighting as they rock back and forth with the motion of her sobs, and you will put down your microwave dinner and bring her the box of tissues and touch a reassuring hand to her back. The girl will tell you that she’s pregnant or that her boyfriend is hitting her or that her mother has cancer. You will pluck a tissue from the box and hand it to her. You will tell her that life isn’t always fair but that there’s beauty in endurance of struggle. That she will make it. That your door will always be open to her. She will leave and something fundamental will have changed between you and you will feel that, for one moment at least, you understand teaching.
You will make the mistake of reading the news. Of reading the comments section. Of paying too much attention to social media. You will see that you are overpaid, that are are underworked, that you are a part-time employee. You will read quotes from politicians who decry America’s crumbling education system, homeowners who see you and your tax-funded salary as a ponzi scheme. You will examine your bank statement and your student loan debt and wonder what in the hell compelled you into such a profession. You will marvel at the maddening juxtaposition of the difficulty of teaching to the meager pay and public misunderstanding and wonder, seriously wonder, what would coax anyone into a classroom, let alone you.
Spring will come and you will drift through the space of your school in an unpowered orbit, the rocket fuel of your now naive-seeming enthusiasm long burned away. You will go home some days and sit in a dark room and your spouse will try again to counsel you. Maybe this just isn’t for you, she will say. You will be too stubborn to admit that you’ve been wondering the same for months. Still, you’ll will yourself to the school every morning, pulling into the parking lot in the gray haze of early morning, in the gray haze of the start of another day for which you do not feel ready.
And yet there will be successes. You will have a minor breakthrough with a student or a class. A lesson will work as intended, or a student who thought he hated you will reveal that you’re actually his favorite teacher. A colleague will observe you and offer praise. A principal will applaud your growth. The last day of school will arrive and your students will talk openly with you, will share that you’re one of the good ones. You’ll know that, even if you weren’t the greatest teacher of their lives, you at least made a connection with some of them, and that will be something.
Most of all, teacher, you will know after this first year that you were tried and found wanting. You will look back and see that all of your delusions of grandeur — all of the fairytales you told yourself about strolling into a classroom like Erin Gruwell in Freedom Writers — belong to a previous version of your teacher self. An innocent and long distant version. You will know that to achieve anything more than mere competence will require tremendous struggle. You will begin to retrace your steps back through all of your mistakes, cringing all the while at yourself. If you are dogged enough and egotistical enough and humble enough you will return the following year a revised version of you, new and improved. And if you are lucky you will begin to see teaching for what it truly is: a never-ending cycle of self-improvement, of self discovery, of learning, in which one must live with ambiguity and the unresolvable truth that perfect mastery is never achievable.
Don’t listen to popular wisdom: your students will not change. Decades into your career, they will still wear expressions of apathy as they cross the threshold into your classroom. They will still direct their radar at you. They will still groan at your best laid plans. The boy with the white sneakers and the earbuds will still slouch in his seat. But if you can survive this first year, if you can tune out the news and the politicians and the voices of people who do not and will never understand your profession, you will by degrees come to see your students differently. You will begin to see them for their contradictions and their life and their energy and their beauty. You will come to truly see them. And you will know.
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Damian Gessel is a former award-winning news writer and current veteran high school English teacher living and working in Central Pennsylvania. He is passionate about writing and the teaching of writing, his wife and two small children, and his Goldendoodle, Macy.
Photo: Ian Schneider
