Before I begin this post, I adhere to the rules of FERPA: Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. I will never reveal my students’ identities, their performance in my classes, or reveal anything about them that will make them identifiable in my posts. Gracias y con permiso 🙏🏻

I always thought that teaching was exhausting because of the kids. Putting on a show 5 times a day, 5 times a week is exhausting. Supporting students in their individual learning is exhausting. Communicating with parents is (scary and) exhausting.
But all of that is part of the job, that’s the part that everyone sees so everyone knows. The part you don’t see unless you have been a teacher or are married to one (teaching English abroad is not the same, sorry not sorry) is that a teacher is a cog in a big-ass wheel, and the cog can’t tell the wheel where to go, when to stop or to turn the fuck around.

This is what my teacher brain looks like right now:

NOW LET ME JUST SAY SOMETHING UNRELATED TO ANYTHING ABOUT ANY OF THIS BEFORE WE DIVE IN:

I haven’t written in a very long time, since before the pandemic struck a perpetual cord of anxiety and a cloud of uncertainty like a tent pitched over the globe. In March 2020 I went home for “Spring Break” and waited out the storm with my new baby nephew and family. After all of this movement: first from Guatemala to Atlanta to Tucson and back to Atlanta to camp out as a pandemic lowered like Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball into our glorious independence and national consumerist penchant, a candle still flickered for one man who gave me his heart and his promise until I broke it, whatever “it” was, including and perhaps featuring my own heart.

In late March I laid in bed in Mableton, Georgia, AKA “Where?” and wrestled with the urge to email him. In April I heard of the first COVID case in Guatemala and thought: ‘Now, this is when I write and say “Hey I hear the virus is coming to a theatre near you. Do not eat the popcorn” or “Hey, I hope you and your family are safe” or “Hey, are you alive? If you are, please use hand sanitizer.”‘

I wasn’t holding on but I wasn’t letting go. I was not Jack or Rose in Titanic I was like Kathy Bates. When given the option, always be Kathy Bates. I digress and hit an iceberg.

Meanwhile throughout the Fall in my grad program, I pulled the Crossroads card and the Mouse from my Lenormand deck. I went to a psychic on my 33rd birthday because I’d never been before, and I had questions. She unfolded a full deck and I took a picture, but I didn’t understand it: “This deck shows someone special to you, is it a Grandmother?” And I knew she was talking about my Nana and my host family, Abuelita. “Can I take notes?” and I scribbled furiously in my sketchbook. She mentioned love: “There is a tension here, yet unresolved.” Me: “Do the cards say if I will end-up with this person?” Psychic:”It is unclear until whatever going on in your heart center is resolved.” I slumped in the chair. She looked up and said what I do not have in my notes because I wrote them in my heart: “You are exactly where you need to be right now.”

If you are already uncomfortable with divination cards, come back. I think of them as cards to center your awareness on a situation and give you the opportunity to respond, not as ‘fortune telling.’ So, on an educational front I spent the last year, or at least The Fall of 2019, learning about language acquisition and world languages methodology. I learned that most of the worksheets and practices in my current classroom of instruction were caca. By October, I am stronger now.: I pressed send on an email unlike the other drafts getting dusty in my storage folder. “I need to unlink from social media. We need to move on.” His response was a melon-baller to the heart. and he replied “I totally understand and yes, I know we have moved on.” Now I will never, ever put grammar before form but [have moved on] is pluperfect and [move on] is present tense. Pluperfect, ahem, “is used to describe finished actions that have been completed at a definite point in time in the past.”

Son of a bare infinitive.

You see, I was present tense moving on when I wrote that email. Hell, that’s why I wrote it. Elmer got into my soul and took root there and the break-up became a prefix to my existence. Ahem, the main function of a prefix is to change the meaning of the word it attaches to. My heartbreak was a prefix in Tucson, and lingered until the middle of a damndemic in my parent’s guest room in Mableton, My Heart Will Go On and On. I laid in the dark and thought: “This churning feeling is good, this is your capacity to love, Natalie. Be grateful you can love so strongly.” But you don’t say “Take heart, those were the most beautiful roses I ever saw” when someone’s epic garden is destroyed in a hurricane.

In Yuma, Arizona, visiting my college best friend, yes I said Yuma, I worked on my book in June. I got to the chapters where I wrote about the relationship I shared with Elmer. I opened Gmail. I am stronger now. Two weeks later: “I met someone, her name is _________ and we are having a baby together whose name is _____ ______ _____ _______.” Yes, all four names of his daughter. Now I am no grammar-monger but when you say ‘whose name is’ you are talking about present tense. That baby is a fixture, primeramente Dios. And it hit me, or I hit it, like an iceberg.

I sunk into the ocean to find more tears because I’d already cried them all. You don’t go on that kind of emotional journey but once in a while, so I took copious notes of all the ways I felt the loss.

And then the love sealed like a vault. Sealed: present perfect. The love. It’s in there but I can’t reach it anymore. It has been sealed.

Now, let’s return to teaching. I got my Master’s in May 2020, the year of perfect vision, despite living out of state for three months. Before I started this program and drove across the country in May 2019 in my Pontiac Vibe, my plan was to teach internationally; but even before the pandemic pulled the fire alarm on all our plans, I was thinking of a plan B. I went to a Tucson job fair in February and sat across from two exhausted school personnel after their long day of interviews. I was sure they’d already found someone for the position and this was nothing more than lip service. When I got the call the next Tuesday that they wanted an interview, I said: “This is great news!”

The assistant principal and the World Languages department head asked me seven questions. Among my responses I shared that I speak parlor K’iche’ (just enough to make me funny). The department head gasped and said: “I have students who speak K’iche’!” From then on, I knew this school was my next home. For 5 months, I held my breath as I awaited a contract. I was offered the job but everything was in upheaval due to the aforementioned mask-raptor-flash.

Meanwhile I pored over Harry Wong’s The First Days of School in a summer book club. Week after wekk I waited to hear if we would be teaching in-person. In late July After a week of chaotic online training, I started my teaching career from my $40 used couch prized from Facebook Marketplace. As Arizona became a ‘hot-spot’ for the disease, I went into teaching with no idea if I could teach: not in the classroom or out of it. Of this I am still not sure. By teach I mean the whole package, not simply instructing (which is complex itself). I am asked to log every communication with families into the online database. If a student fails my class for not showing up, I have to defend the failing grade by furnishing the attempts I made to bring the grade up, with dates and details. I attend weekly Professional Development meetings. That is just a preview.

At this moment on a harried Friday night in September I’ve been teaching online for 4 weeks and I feel like a Truckload of computers hit me. The amount of unexpecteds like homes without internet, students with anxiety to be on camera, students who already speak Spanish natively in a beginner Spanish class, the waterfall of late work submissions to go back into the gradebook to accept, learning 130 names and faces/or black boxes with white letters, and navigating Microsoft Outlook, Clever, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft One Note, Zoom, Synergy, APEX and Flipgrid while knocking on virtual doors to ask “where is your kid? Do they have the Zoom link?” has sent me into a tailspin. I still get emails that ask for the password, four weeks in. I am a mandatory reporter, a bilingual teacher, a lesson planner, a curriculum writer, a behavioral interventionist, a standards aligner, a zoom specialist, an exceptional education teacher (formerly special ed), an IT helpline, a family communications facilitator, a social worker for trauma-impacted youth, a grade book (yes, I am a walking grade book), a reminder of all things “What was the homework?” and a classroom management newb. The first week I got a message from a student that said “Thank you bitch” and I am still trying to figure. On Sunday nights, I call home from my Google Voice number to tell the parents how well their students are performing in my class. “Oh, thank you so much.” They are surprised. “Hey, John: add me on Snap” “No personal conversation in the chat!!” I remind them on Zoom. Then a kid makes a comment about using crack over Labor day weekend and I have to report it and call home. I WANT A FLUFFY PILLOW.

I am boarding dogs, donating plasma and babysitting to satisfy my finances. And then I remember where I lived before this, and how often I was asked to ‘take me with you to the USA when you go.’ The land of dreams. The land of wealth. The land of opportunity.

Now, a deep breath, as I say to my students in my conference period. Hold it, exhale. Tell me about your best day. Describe the emoji you feel most like right now. Okay, now that class has ended, what emoji do you feel like now? What is one word that describes you? What is the word that describes the opposite of how you feel. Draw a picture of how you are doing. Hold it up to the screen. (I copy down the drawings and show them in a week’s time: how does this drawing compare to what you feel now?) Social-Emotional Learning. Self-care. The smirks on their faces, the reactions in the little boxes on Zoom as I change the filter on my face: a bolo hat, a unicorn horn, sunglasses. My exceptional ed. student presses the laughing face reaction.

Anyone who thrives in this profession learns how to care more about what’s important like these stunning moments of connection with students, and care less about what isn’t. Unfortunately administration coupled with the voices in my head tell me everything is important.

This is where things link me to my recent life in Peace Corps.

My students who live in group homes are refugees from Central American countries. One student is 16 and does not read (imagine our individual Zoom call: por favor comparte la pantalla… donde dice en verde: comparte la pantalla. Allí. Eso mero. Después escoge la ventana donde dice ‘Clever.’ Bien hecho. No, no vete por atrás. Okay, muy bien. Ahora busca el iconográfico donde dice Flipgrid. Allí Muy bien. No no, el equis negro. Aja. Este. Ahora busque la…) They are far from home and they are in a beginner’s Spanish class as native Spanish speakers, staring at me on a screen with a class full of English-speaking students, as well as bilingual Spanish-English students, and English learners, as I wearily translate between them. They call me “Teacher” in English with a thick ‘ch’ sound and a hard ‘r’- “Tea-chaid.” I guess that’s me now, with the wave of a wand and a Zoom call: bippity boppity mute.

Today an ELL (English-Language Learner) student said he learned the word ‘way’ in English. I said ‘okay like camino or manera.’ And he said ‘yes.’ The non-Spanish-speaking students said: “I learned Estadounidense.” Oh and I attended 2 IEP meetings, an online training, made my first mandatory report and called home to 6 different parents to say “your daughter has an F in my class. How can I hep her complete her assignments?” always offering, never scolding. Check my implicit and explicit biases toward my marginalized students, recognize the gap in performance brought on by this historical marginalization. Call out my racism. Always growth mindset never fixed.

My exhaustion feels fixed.

I am not the person who wrote this blog in 2016-2019. Writing about myself feels a little silly as I am entrenched in the burgeoning adult mind of my mid-30s. Life is less and less about me. I’d like to get out of my head and out of myself. But then I realize that teaching is doing just that. I am going to write about teaching as it is a massive stamp in my passport to global citizenship. Among 130 students, they speak Arabic, French, Russian, Spanish, Mam, Kinyarwanda, Somali, English, Dari and Tigrinya. In their profiles on the database, I can learn their birthdays, if they need to be tested for vision or hearing, if they have custody specifications, if they have an IEP (Individualized Education Program), if they have an MTSS plan (A multi-tiered system of supports), what their written language to home should be, if they have historical clerical entries (I’m still unsure about that one), their 504s, or if they are GATE- Gifted and Talented Education. I can see their schedules, all of their grades, their attendance history and all behavioral and communication logs. Multiply this by 130.

It takes bravery to be foreign, to not belong. I am learning a new language, the language of public school secondary education, and I am an outsider coming in. Peace Corps was the hardest experience I ever lived, and teaching is the hardest job I’ve ever loved. Heartbreak and love fill the spaces in between, and now more gray hairs, twice-weekly plasma donations, babysitting and boarding pets for extra cash. I will tell you what takes bravery: being a good teacher.