I looked around the room “Who is feeling grumpy today? I see that you all look grumpy.” I comment, offhandedly.
Let’s play “I’m grumpy and here’s why” and whoever wanted to share, shared. “I’m grumpy because you changed the seating chart.” “I’m grumpy because I have no friends.” A student said they had no friends, and a bunch of students in the room raised their hands to tell the student that they are his friend. Then I asked the students if they were feeling grateful. A student raised his hand and said “I am grateful because I wake up every day, and I am grateful just for waking up.” Another one said “I am grateful because I don’t know, it’s just a good day.” Apparently, the student in the back said “I am grateful because I found out I have friends.” I didn’t hear it, but my mentor heard it and filled me in. She comes to observe my classes and asks me questions. I am asking myself a lot of questions and so is everyone else who is coming to support and observe me.

Then another student showed me how to Get Sturdy (which is a Tik Tok dance) and then the bell rang.

And that’s how the game “Grumpy and Grateful” was created. It just happened about 4 hours ago. I went home and watch YouTube dances on how to Get Sturdy so I can surprise them tomorrow. I’ll play the song and do the dance and some will laugh and some will think it’s dumb and some will love it but won’t crack a smile.

I don’t remember when I have ever felt like I was enough. I’ve never felt that way. And then I chose a career path, because that’s what adults do (choose a career, I hear), that would remind me every day that I am not enough.

But I am. Of course I am.

Of course I am.

I have googled over these last months what “first year teachers need to know.” Each of the articles have come obscenely up short. Like how I feel too: coming up short.

But how could I expect not to?

Well, here is what I think first year teachers need to know.
(I am writing from an emotional place, but a very real one. Emotions are real, and they matter. And while they don’t last forever, they matter).
But I do want to say that feeling insufficient is an emotion powerful enough to shift anyone’s perspective. And I feel like the definition of insufficient. Insufficient: N. Spanish teacher in Tucson with curly hair and a penchant for peanut butter.

Without further ado, the list of things I learned my first year:

1. I (before I started teaching) imagined why teaching was hard, because everyone told me (especially the good teachers and maybe exclusively the good ones) just how hard it was, and I wanted to prepare myself. I tried to imagine the tension that tired teachers describe so that it wouldn’t surprise me when I was hit with the sandstorm of tension I had always heard about. I stuffed a bunch of empty ideas into that space because ideas even with effort but without experience, are hollow. But still, there they were, my placeholders for all the reasons the job would be hard, just in case I needed to fill up that space with actual stuff.
2. And then I started the job on caffeine and a prayer. I didn’t care if I was The World’s Best Teacher, which is something every teacher somewhere in the back of their mind thinks about as if it actually exists, and holds themself to that impossible standard every now and again just to relate to what Pluto feels like post planetary-ostracization, but I wanted to be good. I wanted to be a good teacher. I didn’t know what that was, or how to make it, but I tried to think of what good teachers did when I was young, and I tried to emulate that.
3. And then for the first time, I felt it. I got swallowed by it. The tension. And it was more space than I prepared for with my hollow placeholders, and much heavier than I could have anticipated, and the space started to grow with all of the tension I felt and I crumbled like bleu cheese on a bed of romaine.
4. No one has told me that I was doing a good job, unless as an afterthought or in direct response to me saying “No one has told me I am doing a good job.” And I receive “feedback” which is just a means of keeping tabs on me.
5. I watch heads sink to desks with no signs of lifting, and I watch masks come up and down in a pandemic as students eat right in front of me while I’ve asked them not to, and students come in when they’ve skipped my class until they get caught, and I wonder: “Am I doing this right?” And then I teach my lessons I’ve scrambled to put together and I realize “Oh, I am not doing this right” as the students who get lost for lack of focus or boredom or learning differences or who-knows-what just give up on the words I am trying to teach them with gestures, repetition, questions and pictures. I don’t have textbooks so I make my own PowerPoints which are three a day because I have three preps (three unique courses I teach in one day, two I repeat for the class sections). I go home, stare at the ceiling, and do it again.
6. I cry all the time. I cry with relief, sadness, but most of the time, it’s a tie between frustration and exhaustion.
7. My paycheck is like a knock knock joke. Knock knock, who’s there. Nobody. Nobody who? Nobody your paycheck, that’s who! And then I feel guilty immediately after for complaining about the paycheck when there are people who make less than I do and work just as hard, or harder. I go through that cycle every day, probably several times a day.
8. Non-teachers don’t get it, and look at you like you are crazy for staying. Maybe you are. But if not you, then who? And also, what else would you do?
9. You can go out and buy the supplies you need, or apply for a grant for the supplies you need (on your free time, and then of course there is the waiting for the grant to be approved and then for the stuff to come in, time which you probably don’t have).
10. Why do the pencils you keep putting in the cup disappear? Why is it my fault that they disappear when I haven’t set-up the appropriate protocol to keep them in the room? I put big cumbersome labels on them.. and still.
11. Why can’t I make a seating chart that keeps everyone from talking?
12. Why does the school want me to send the students to ISS and why do I feel like I don’t want to do that because then I will lose that student, and everyone in their life has sent them to the proverbial or actual ISS? Oh also it’s not ISS, it’s ISI now, but what does ISI mean?
13. Administration just sent an email that mentions, among other things, the importance of not sending students to ISI after a year of shelter-in-place but, we are sending students to ISI.
14. Why can’t I control everyone? Why do I want to control everyone? I thought I was a teacher and now I feel like I am playing a game of control Tetris where I just try to get the freshman boys to stop talking during 6th period but there is no way to keep all of the talkers apart.
15. “Don’t feel bad. Send them to ISI. They can’t derail your lessons like that.”
16. When a student looks at you like death, just ignore it. They don’t realize it. It’s not worth having an intervention conversation with them, wait until they curse you out or start fighting in your class and THEN have the intervention.
17. I am doing something meaningful. I don’t know if the students are learning as much or as often as they should, or if someone else would do it better, but there is a humbling process of having 130 students stare at you every day. Something like being baptized by fire because you are scared.
18. You are actually scared because students ended a fight with gunshots in the air and one got suspended. You don’t know who the students are, the email from admin said Student A and Student B.
19. You have a million people telling you they care, but when they stop by to check on you (not people from school, but district-assigned people who are supposed to support you, or coworkers), all you can think to do is vent and complain because they asked you how you are doing and you aren’t even sure because maybe Student A or Student B is in your class, but you don’t know. And then you go home feeling like an idiot for complaining too much, or crying, or complaining while crying which is a classic combo.
20. You don’t give up because it will be winter break and then summer break. You absolutely work for the weekends, and the summers off. For the summer, you will find a second job so that you can afford to pay for that summer, but at least you have two months away. Unless you teach summer school to help make extra income. Then you will have one month away where you will try not to think about how many days left until school starts.
21. The most encouraging thing that any teacher will tell you is that the first year is the hardest, and the first few years are hard. Just cling to that and hope they are right. Don’t wait for someone else to make your copies. Just go make them because you can’t give them 24-hours notice when you didn’t even know what you were going to be teaching 10 hours ago.
22. That student went home realizing he has friends. And that is what I am grateful for. The rest of this post is mostly my grumpies. Bear with me, I am new.