I got a text message in the middle of vacation the other week:
“Hey Ryan, Ms. Jennings died.”
I got the news that a colleague I worked very closely with passed away suddenly. I will be honest: at the time, I didn’t feel anything besides “oh, that’s really sad.” In the middle of vacation, I still wanted to enjoy myself.
It sounds selfish, but I won’t deny it’s what I felt at the time. I never really stopped thinking about it. But I didn’t grieve the way they do in the movies — I heard about the news second-hand, from my old workplace. I didn’t go to the funeral. I didn’t make a deeply personal social media post. I wasn’t necessarily the closest person to her — I wasn’t her sorority sister or someone who knew her for years.
But I did work closely with this particular teacher and colleague last year. I knew she had health problems in the past, but it seemed like she was in good spirits and doing at least okay.
I felt the worse about one part of her death: that she spent so much of last year alive suffering.
She was thrown into a very difficult situation in a very difficult time
Last year, I was a special education teacher for students with moderate to severe disabilities in the most restrictive setting. It’s called self-contained, and it’s the service students get outside the general education setting when the IEP team agrees they can’t get their academic needs met in a general education classroom.
Last year was also the year after full-on virtual learning and all our kids were coming back to in-person learning after essentially a year and a half being out of school. I don’t like talking about it much anymore, but I won’t mince words, try to save face, or make an appearance that everything was going fine when it wasn’t.
The 2021–2022 school year for me and so many of my colleagues was an absolute shitshow. It makes sense: a lot of kids were out of school for a long time, disengaged from virtual learning, and just weren’t used to being in school again. All the loss and trauma from the pandemic likely didn’t help either.
There were many days I went home and could do absolutely nothing for two to three hours. I would try to lay down if I could, but working with kids who were going through so much was not an easy feat. I loved each and every one of them, but every day, I would go home overwhelmed and question my ability as a teacher to support kids eight grade levels below where they were supposed to be or kids who completely shifted the tone of the classroom with their behavior.
I burnt out early but toughed it out. I didn’t stay with it because of a deep sense of resilience, service, or nobility either. Maybe that was a small part of it. A large part of it was simply desperation, vanity, and pride, which I often suspect is a huge reason why a lot of people stay in their jobs. Quitting mid-year has huge career consequences, plus I needed the job for income and stability. I also am more proud of a person than I’d like to admit, and I wasn’t going to let one tough year as a teacher break my ability to teach — I’d been through worse.
But I didn’t blame the people who did quit mid-year, either. It was an incredibly tough year, and they were just doing what was best for themselves. I respected that decision as courage above all else, to realize something isn’t working and back away from it.
There were several teachers. I saw two colleagues I worked closely with quit by November. I saw another leave for another school district, and I heard a story of another teacher who came into work, told the kids “I can’t take this shit anymore!”, and then walked out. He only returned the next day to get his stuff.
Our administrators were just as frustrated as we were. For a while, it seemed like nothing could be done about discipline. One administrator even got injured trying to break up a fight at some point and had to get surgery. I saw them just as, if not more stressed than teachers, as it seemed like all they dealt with was the discipline issues from students’ trauma and some students’ lack of conflict resolution skills. While expelling and suspending kids is no longer the answer, especially with all the inequities and racial disparities they result in, I wasn’t quite sure if the alternative approach was working either.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was when the teacher who was essentially my partner suddenly quit in March. I taught all the ninth graders English, and she taught them math. I’d never seen anyone work as hard as she did, documenting phone calls, making sure all her paperwork was on time and showing up every day with a well-planned lesson for her students.
Despite having all the commitment in the world, it wasn’t enough. Student behavior was horrible in her class. Although we taught the same students, she was much nicer than I was, which really shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing, but inevitably was in an environment that prioritized strictness and an authoritarian style of teaching. I was way too nice once upon a time, too, but eventually I had to reconcile the need to provide a safe space for my kids, be more strict than I wanted to be, and the fact that I was too naive at first about what kind of teacher I wanted to be.
After a student threatened her, she quit and put in her letter of resignation. I kept in touch because she was going through the same thing I was, only worse, and wished her the best in her future endeavors. But I was pretty distraught about it for about two weeks or so, and the kids noticed I wasn’t as active or on top of things as I usually was.
Someone needed to take over the class. It was a self-contained math class where kids needed intensive support, and here entered my colleague who recently passed away. For the last three months of the school year, she was assigned to take over the class. She had previously been the department head for our school’s math department, but she had suffered a brain tumor and needed time to recover.
The fact that one teacher was already driven out by the class should have been a sign that it wouldn’t be an easy class to take over. Two weeks in, I fielded complaints from students that her standards were too high, and that she got on their nerves. Of course I defended the teacher who I knew probably felt the same way as me and had the same frustrations. I checked in frequently, and wrote her a certificate of appreciation during our teacher appreciation week.
Once or twice a week, I would walk into her as we both left the building. I initially expected a simple check in or chat about how it was going, but the conversations revolved around how much our class stressed her out, and how much she went home with her husband urging her to quit every day instead of being subject to such intense stress.
Like with the previous teacher, our kids were out of control in her class. I encouraged her to do what was best for herself, and just be whatever support I could be. She asked for any help she could get, so I provided her a spreadsheet of each of our students’ updated contact information that may or may not have been accurately captured in our system. I gave my experience of what classroom and instructional strategies worked for each kid (having taught them for seven months at that point), and who should be separated from whom.
Let me just preface that I didn’t feel like I was doing much better in terms of handling the behavior. My strength has always been my constant communication with parents, so for most kids, a quick “don’t throw a pencil again or I’m going to call your mom” worked to mitigate much of the behavioral concerns. I also taught a lot of them in the morning, first period, where attendance was more sporadic. But the truth was I was also just surviving with the group. I did the best I could, but I did feel like every one of my students could use a better education with a more picturesque teacher.
It’s not like everything magically became sunshine and roses, but over the next two months, her experience did get a bit better. I got another job in the school system for the next school year, and when I announced it, she thanked me for helping her get through such a difficult class.
Takeaways
I haven’t spoken to Ms. Jennings since I left the school, but I hoped she was doing better.
Now, I work in a capacity that’s more middle management, making sure paperwork gets done, and dealing with parent complaints constantly. It’s not the best, but it’s not as stressful as last year was.
I know she died not because of stress, but health. But I can’t help but feel like the stress from those three months contributed, even if I will never know at the end of the day. No one factor contributes to someone’s bad health and suffering. I just wished she didn’t suffer so much, and I think about whether the outcome would be different if she wasn’t walking into a wall of unbearable stress every single day.
This is the unforgiving nature of the world of education. I wish it wasn’t that way. Working in education is the perfect example of caring a lot about your job, but your job not loving you back. Ms. Jennings was a teacher who cared a lot and held our students to high standards. She expected the best out of them every day, but that came with backlash.
I think it’s just painful to think about. Maybe there was a lot going on in her life I didn’t know about — I just know what I saw and experienced with the same group of students.
I know I’m a lot younger, but it was a lesson to me that relationships and health trump everything. I overwork myself frequently and go too hard in my new job and in law school, and my colleagues and friends often tell me to chill out and take a breather.
As for my colleague, I know Ms. Jenningsis in Heaven and resting with God, but that doesn’t rob the pain of wishing she could be in the position to put her health first, and an incredibly unforgiving job second.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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