Should I keep teaching this year?

This is a fairly urgent post, seeing as most schools go back in about a month. :)

Pros of teaching

-It’s never boring. Every other job or internship I’ve had, even the ones I liked or really liked, were boring. Computer jobs are boring. It’s just…true. I contend that any job you could do fully remotely is boring. Teaching is never boring. The kids at my last school were, and I say this with all the love in the world, insane. They said insane things to one another and to me. The school environment was so chaotic. I was never bored.

-The kids were, as I’ve mentioned, insane and hilarious and I loved them. They roasted each other constantly in ruthlessly creative ways that I don’t feel comfortable replicating. They roasted the school constantly, and these I’m perfectly happy to write down publicly. Example: I asked one of my sweetest, most friendly students to go borrow scissors from the main office, scissors being one of many things (board markers, tape, stapler—basically any single item necessary to the functioning of a classroom) that I could not, for the life of me, keep track of. Anyway, I asked this student to go get scissors. (Side note: 13-year-olds LOVE getting stuff from other places, especially during English class. Never was I more reliably met with more enthusiasm than when I asked if anyone could go borrow the broom from the music room across the hall.) She said, Is Mr. K there? I said, Yes, probably. She said, I don’t want to go—his eyes scare me and he talks to me like I’m a dog. Roasted! (And not incorrect!) Another time, we were discussing missions in class. I asked the students what our school’s mission was—what did our school value? One of my favorite students said, I think the thing this school values most is…never fixing the bathroom. See? I love them!

-Even the worst students were, somehow, sweet and amazing sometimes. I’m picturing one student this year who could not stop talking to save his life. And not just talking: singing, laughing, mocking. He was reading at about a 4th grade reading level in 7th grade, and he made my life extremely difficult most days. And yet still, he made me laugh all the time. I would pull him outside to talk to him about some infraction, and he’d look me dead in the eyes and be like, Do we have to do this? And I would laugh because, like, yeah, I’m with you—do we seriously have to keep doing this?

-Most of the time, I felt very strongly that what I was doing was extremely important. Literacy and reading comprehension are human rights, I think, and teaching kids to read effectively is one of the most important tasks I could imagine doing with my days. Especially kids who are coming into 7th grade one or two or three grade levels behind, as about 85% of my students were.

Cons

-Exhausted. All the time. Tired in the morning waking up; tired after school; falling asleep at 9pm, so tired I can barely brush my teeth.

-The indignities of working with kids are many. Sometimes, I felt like a glorified nanny, providing childcare instead of an education. Sometimes, I had to deal with problems so absurd and stupid they made me feel crazy: seating arrangement disputes; one kid reliably never, ever having a pencil.

-13-year-olds are amazing and I love them, and also they can be deeply annoying. They ignore you; they give you blank stares when you ask them to do sometime imminently reasonable. They complain relentlessly. Everything is about them. They can’t control their emotions. They have very little follow-through.

-The societal perceptions of teachers—especially as someone with, admittedly, a complex around being smart—were brutal sometimes. I had family members straight up say that I was “too smart” to be a teacher. I had friends tell me I was “a saint” to be doing what I was doing, that they could “never,” all of which felt like them telling me that my life sounded like hell.

-New York City teachers are paid very well compared to teachers in other states, and very poorly compared with people whose jobs are literally useless. It makes me so, so, so angry to think about the fact that I get paid less than people who work in MARKETING. Teaching REAL kids how to literally READ so that they can have jobs and be functional citizens versus selling bullshit products to people who do not need them, and somehow the marketing people come out on top salary-wise? Capitalism is a cruel, sick system.