“Wow, it seems a lot calmer than my school last year,” I said. “It seems like there aren’t as many fights here.”
I was about to head home after a long day in my office job as an IEP chair (someone who deals with paperwork to meet legal mandates all day). I go out in the hallways during transitions to tell kids to go to class and put their uniforms on, and my colleague and I will conference with individual parents and students all day.
It’s an important job, but it’s not the classroom. I can go the whole day just being in the office and doing paperwork to meet super urgent deadlines., so my interactions with students is a lot less than it was when I was a teacher.
I said the comment to a hall monitor at my school. He gave me a strange look and said:
“What are you talking about? We had like five fights today.”
There have been numerous other occasions where I was entirely out of the loop.
Just yesterday, I heard a bunch of loud yelling and banging outside our office. I was busy, so I delayed going out and checking out what was going on. Multiple students had gotten into a huge fight in the classroom next door, and a substitute and a teacher I work with got injured trying to break up the fight.
It was another reminder that I was so immersed and occupied by my office paperwork that I barely know what was going on around the school anymore. And I felt incredibly guilty that that was my new reality.
As someone who doesn’t spend the whole day interacting with kids and having my own classroom anymore, I don’t know if it’s disingenuous that I still call myself a teacher to people who don’t know anything about education.
It’s tough to actually explain what I do — even teachers have a hard time understanding what I do. I’m still a “teacher” by title in many respects. I still get all the teacher discounts because of my work email. So defaulting to saying I’m an “educator” or “teacher” is just easier.
I hate to say it, but I’m much less stressed
I also regret to say that compared to last year, I am significantly less stressed. A lot of people find being an IEP chair stressful because of tight deadlines and mandates that can be unreasonable. And it is much more busy than being a classroom teacher.
My job is a super important job, but making sure the school doesn’t get sued isn’t as impactful as helping a kid raise their reading level significantly, or teaching a kid how to write a sentence.
But in not dealing with the worst parts of the job, which in my experience was having kids call me slurs or cussing me out (a very small minority of kids when they were having bad days, for the record), I’m just having a much better time. And this includes being in law school at night from 6:30–9:30 Mondays to Thursdays. Some days, I’m so busy and have so many urgent deadlines I can barely eat lunch.
What does it say that being busy 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day, having tons of homework, and having to only take 15 minutes for lunch is far less stressful than my time in the classroom?
Also, this is the year when our schools are in dire need of teachers. In the midst of a nationwide teacher shortage where class sizes are bigger than ever. I go into some classes that are special education and in the most restrictive setting — it’s for students who need that smaller setting to access the general education curriculum. It’s supposed to have not that many kids, but I’ll step into some self-contained classrooms and see over 20 kids.
“That’s not self-contained!” I say.
I spent three years as a self-contained English teacher. The most kids I had in one class was 16, and even that was a handful given the intense behavioral and academic needs of each student. I saw several colleagues quit last year and resign mid-year (which has huge professional consequences in education) because of the intense stressors of the job. It was student behavior, but it was also the administrative workload on top of it and endless demands.
The list of “stressors for teachers” can run hundreds of items long, and it can be an excruciatingly painful job for that reason.
Why I will never judge teachers from the ivory tower
Being a classroom teacher will always be the most important job in education.
I say that with the utmost deference and experience in my time as a classroom teacher, who felt completely helpless whenever I sent a kid wreaking havoc and interfering with the learning of everyone else in my classroom to the office, only for that student to be sent back with no consequence.
Now I am in an ivory tower, exposed to teachers who do deal with the stress all day but not being exposed to it myself. Half my friends are teachers, so it is bittersweet to say I’m much less stressed by my new job and doing a great job at it, but not in the trenches, helping with the teacher shortage, not being exposed to kids.
I’m at a school now with some of my old students — students I taught in my first year of teaching. Two of them asked the same thing:
“Mr. Fan, why are you not teaching a class anymore? You were a great teacher.”
“Really?” I respond.
For these particular students, I did not feel like I was a great teacher. It was my first year, and I didn’t feel like I enforced a safe and conducive learning environment. I was too soft and nice, and the result was a classroom where some kids felt like they could bully other kids, get into altercations, and throw things at each other.
I promised I could never make that mistake again and have kids feel unsafe in my classroom, so I swung a bit too much in the other direction.
Regardless, it was a reminder that as a classroom teacher, it’s normal to feel like you’re never doing enough. It’s normal to never feel like you’re doing a good job. There was never a time where I felt like I was doing everything I could to help my kids. I didn’t feel like there was enough of me to give.
Eventually, I got good enough to stop conflicts and altercations before they happened. Better classroom management meant stopping situations before they become situations. But I still made mistakes later in my career, and I became so strict that I wouldn’t let students in without their uniforms on (enforcing a school policy) and I didn’t even let kids get out of their seats to sharpen their pencils.
Here I was, feeling like I was a prison guard (a lot of kids and administrators still said I was too nice at times though), so scared of failing my kids like I did my first year that I overcorrected substantially. I got into education to try to change the system and be a teacher who could be part of the solution, and I became part of the problem.
Of course, a lot of things can be true at once. The truth is most teachers are part of the solution and part of the problem. There were kids I couldn’t reach, and kids I helped a lot. You can’t criticize the education system when you are part of that system, but at the same time, everyone is doing what they can to reform it in the way they see best.
Being in the classroom will always be the most important job
I digress, but in terms of the stressors on teachers, I see it every day. I see it in my friends who teach, and I see it, particularly in my fiancee, who is still a classroom middle school English teacher. A lot of days, she comes home with a world of stress, and I won’t always be the most emotionally available person with everything I have going on.
I guess I haven’t been the best listener when she talks about problems in her classroom. I made a comment that was out of touch with the realities of teaching a lot of kids who could barely read and dealing with discipline issues, which a lot of teachers deal with.
“I think you’re already forgetting what it was like to be in the classroom,” she said.
Initially, I felt defensive. I was just in the classroom three and a half months ago!
But she was right. I’m not experiencing that world of stress every day. I’m not experiencing having kids call me every curse word in the book anymore.
It was a lesson to be a better listener, but to never judge from my ivory tower, to never judge when a teacher is having a hard time, to never judge when a teacher calls it quits and resigns mid-year, to never judge when a teacher is frustrated by a lack of consequence for a student.
These might seem like dogmatic rules to follow, but you have to have been in the classroom to understand it. Being a teacher means, sometimes, having a feeling of helplessness and perpetually being emotionally drained that never goes away.
My job now is important — but it will never be as important as being a classroom teacher.
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Previously Published on Medium
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