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 🙏🏻

Hello, madness, my new friend.

I heard the shouts on the other side of the door and ran outside to see a crowd of students holding up cameras to egg on a fight. I knew it was my student, the freshman who’s been suspended twice already and it’s the 5th week of school.

If you need a pick-me-up (and who doesn’t, especially in these times?), this is not the post for you. You’ve been warned!

I saw her clawing to get past her brother and back into the fray. I knew it wasn’t good. Her brother, the one who had me pulling my hair out in summer school, was the calm one. You might not know what it looks like to pull your hair out with a young person because you might not know how some teenagers talk to some adults. You might, you might not.
Personally, I thought I knew. I stood under a lamina roof with rain pounding and taught sex-ed to classrooms of teenagers in my second language (and that’s generous to call it my second language) in Guatemala. I thought I had seen it all, or enough to know that I had seen some things.

It turns out, there are so many things to see.
I am learning that some teenagers don’t need a reason to be angry at you, because they already have a lifetime of reasons to be angry at everyone. And if one of those students is in your classroom (and that’s a low number), you can make all the phone calls home, you can select observations and pull from a drop-down list of interventions on which you haven’t been trained but must report, and you can pray, but you won’t reach that kid. Not until they grow-up and realize that you were respectful to them, even when they didn’t know what respect was because no one showed it to them before, and it’s too late for them to find you and tell you “Hey, thanks.” As if a metaphorical “Hey, thanks” is the reason why you do what you do.
The kids are hurting, schools are limping, and our system is fractured.

So: what’s the big deal? It’s high school Spanish. Well, it is and it isn’t. What does the word education mean? I’m not sure anymore. I went into Sally Beauty to pick up a box of hair dye with my head still spinning from what I did not accomplish today. I’m surprised I didn’t grab chartreuse.

All I know is that I am in a classroom that I have been decorating since the first week because we had 1.5 days of paid time to arrange it before we jumped into classroom management and syllabi and 4-point grade scales and rubrics, and hall passes and, my personal favorite, masks. While the schedules got rearranged for the first month, I learned several students’ names to have them disappear from the roster the next day and mess up the seating chart. Multiply this by five periods. Best practice says to give out your syllabi the second week, but then that would mean only half of my classes would have gotten one because there are new students all of the time and all the students who leave the school, too.

Now, I believe I should wear a mask. It does not insult my liberties to have fabric over my face when it could potentially be protecting me or other people. I have since come to learn that not everyone shares this opinion or belief. And then there are teenagers who might not know what their beliefs are, they are just tired of wearing the masks. So they wear them constantly around their chin, actively threatening me by way of their exposed nostrils and sometimes mouth..

Why do it, Nat? You could do something else. It’s like I’ve looked into the eyes of the beast now, and I can stare it in the face or run. If I run, that’s my right, and if I don’t, that’s my right. But the burden I feel is not for me, it’s for the students. So whether or not I run, they are suffering and will continue to suffer. “It’s hard to learn when you’re hungry” a student said to me last year. Someone else who is comfortable getting paid veritable pennies will step up and do the same thing I’ve done if it’s not me, but many of the kids will still be hungry. I know I am not the boy with the finger in the dam. There is no dam, honey, we are floating downstream to the cliff.

It’s coming from all sides: parents, students, the system, sexism, classism, and capitalism. That is public education all shaken up like a snow globe. I don’t interact with a lot of parents, but it’s not for lack of calling and emailing. I don’t know what some of their children’s faces look like from the nose down but I know that they talk incessantly while I am talking. And somehow that’s my fault for not having better management skills or positive incentives.

If I burn out, it’s my fault.
If I overthink my lesson plans, it’s my fault.
If I ask for support and I don’t get it, too bad. That’s my fault. I “shouldn’t have gone into education.”
You need to use self-care. Well, people, I’m the last person who knows how to do that right now because I can’t think straight.

At 3:40 I traipsed around the school trying to find out about translation services so I can communicate with a parent about disruptive behavior from their student. The only email address on file for the parent is.. the student’s. So, somehow a translator is going to call or email them and explain something about how their student is being disruptive and that is supposed to help?

During 2nd and 6th, I stood in front of the kids as my lesson crashed and burned. I didn’t like what I was trying to teach them, and I am trying to shelter language and use Comprehensible Input, and my head is spinning.

You can tell me I am doing an amazing job, but unfortunately, everyone is telling me that but doesn’t know. No one sees the choices I make all day, the reminders I dispense like Pez, and the second chances and yes, stickers, I hand out. Scratch that, I have been observed twice since the start. I am a first year teacher. One administrator came in to see if my objective was posted and left without explaining what they were looking for. I brought them back in and scrolled back to my objective and showed them that it was posted on the powerpoint. Whatever.

I think a kid was high in 6th period today, but I have no proof. She kept shouting “booty” to all of my questions and giggling at herself. I had to pull her aside when she said “Up your booty” when I asked where I put a stack of papers. I told her “Can you make a different choice? That makes me uncomfortable.” Sorry, miss. and she sits back down. Sorry. I think I’m the sorry one.

3rd and 4th I wondered the whole time how to teach “verb conjugation” while maintaining the target language. My high school Spanish teacher was nice, and she taught from a textbook. I don’t use the textbooks. I’ve read them. I make all my materials so far, but I see that is not going to work much longer. Last year on Zoom, I managed because we just couldn’t get through the same volume of content. Last year was not a first year. Last year was simply practice for real school.

And then there was 7th period, where I couldn’t find the lesson plan until I remembered an hour after the fact that I had posted it to Clever. Oh well, I made the activity up and it worked. Only teachers know the horror of hearing the bell and realizing simultaneously that they have no lesson. Yesterday the fire alarm went off and we were supposed to check for the students hands to see whose was blue. Yes, they put blue powder on the fire alarms. I didn’t get the email until after the kids left so if I had a kid with blue hands, well, I missed it.

In the last ten minutes, a student who is in the group home came and called over another student in the group home. He was crying and said that he was going to leave the program. These students have moved here from Central America and put into the custody of ICE and sent to school. They currently speak Spanish, and want to learn English, and are in my Spanish class where I am trying to get the rest of the class to speak Spanish. I made an English club for lunch on Thursdays so that they would come practice their English with me so I can get their buy-in during Spanish. I hate to see the students from group homes struggle the way they do. Many are from Guatemala. I know the lamina roofs where some of them studied. I forgot to eat breakfast that morning, too. Oh wait, I just didn’t feel like it that day. Now I remember.

A student wrote on a feedback sheet: “Sometimes I get confess in this class.” I think he meant confused. He is a freshman. The gaps in reading and writing skills in first language are significant and I am trying to teach a second language.

Then there are supplies. I can either go buy the stuff I need myself, or put in a supplies request or apply for a mini-grant and wait for a week or a month for the supplies to come in. I think I’m cutting up 130 red, yellow and green cards I laminated yesterday for my Checks for Understanding which I heard in a PD (professional development) is not a reliable practice anyway.

This morning I forgot my water in the car, and I don’t take off my mask in the classroom to encourage the students to keep them on. I popped open a room temperature LaCroix and stepped in the way back to take a sip.

We are short-staffed, overworked and underpaid. Tale as old as time. Some folks quit when the mask mandate was lowered a few days before the school year and teachers are being called in to cover for everyone else. Others are quitting because the pay just isn’t enough. I hope I get some sleep, but I am all of out of ideas for the lesson tomorrow for Spanish 2 and have nothing prepared. I have my planning period tomorrow morning unless they pull me in to sub.

So, no, it’s not about high school Spanish. It’s about our future as a country and the kids we say don’t matter because they can’t buy their diplomas like some other kids, either by fancy district or by private education. I’ve never been so sad to be from this country, but now that I see it for what it really is, the food unstable, white supremacist, sexist and racist system that it is, including all the ways it has benefitted me and given me the benefit of the doubt, I want to leave and never come back. And maybe that makes me a coward. But today I am not a coward, I am a teacher.

Wish me luck, but I don’t know what the hell for.