I have finally, officially, left the classroom. Applying for a job outside the classroom really taught me a lot about how people view schoolteachers, and it wasn’t pretty. But I did find a job, still in education, but not trapped in a classroom with too many students whose needs a normal human cannot successfully address.
I like the new job. I work with tutors for an after-school tutoring program working with disadvantaged/”at-risk” youth. So I get to do the fun stuff about teaching (planning lessons and such) without all the day-to-day soul-sucking drudgery of the classroom environment. We’re working with small groups, so we can actually get to know and address the needs of the individual students.
There are no bells in my new job. My second day “at the office” I went to the bathroom three times during the day. This was a new and liberating experience for me. I had to go, so I got up and went — didn’t have to wait for a bell, didn’t have to worry about an AP showing up in my room and making snide comments into his walkie-talkie because I’d left class unattended and/or wasn’t doing my duty guarding the hallways during the passing period.
Lunch has also been a surreal experience.
I have AN HOUR for lunch. One full, 60-minute HOUR. My first day, I took my lunchbox and walked downstairs. Down two flights of stairs, until I reached an outside area. Turns out, right outside those stairs is a little walkway with a nice spot to sit, next to a little lake and almost-waterfall. I can sit there, in the shade, listening to the water, feeling the breeze (thawing out from the A/C abuse inside the building), eating my lunch. For a full hour.
I was done eating in 20 minutes. And that was after leaving the office and going down two flights of stairs, looking for a place to sit and eat.
When I was in the classroom, first, there was nowhere nice to go. The school did have a courtyard, but the students were there. Or they could see you from the classrooms, since all the windows faced out to the courtyard. The only sanctuary was your own classroom, where you’d been cooped up all day anyway.
And while I know I had 30 minutes to eat, those minutes seem different. School-minutes must run faster than office-minutes; how come now I finish eating in less than 30 minutes, but then I barely finished wolfing down the same amount of food in supposedly the same amount of time?
It doesn’t make sense. Time as we know it must suffer some sort of molecular time warp when it passes through school doors…
Here in Texas school starts tomorrow. Good luck, patience and inner peace to all of you going back to the trenches this week.
3 Comments
September 12, 2009 at 5:46 am
This is a funny post. Sad to hear that you have left classroom teaching- but then you had me convinced by the end. Good luck to you.
Will you ever go back to it?
September 18, 2009 at 12:16 pm
I’m still in education and will be tutoring, but I don’t see myself going back to the classroom… at least not anytime soon.
Part of the reason I left is, sadly enough, that I want to have kids of my own, and we can’t afford for me to quit my job and be a stay-at-home mom. I knew there was no way I could handle teaching+baby, but I can handle office job+ baby, and still do both jobs well.
September 18, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Interesting again. Myself and Mrs Teacher (who isn’t actually a teacher but still works long hours in a stressfull job) don’t yet have kids but it is definitely something that we both want in the near future. When I am either working late into the night or collapsed on the couch with work-related stress/fatigue, I often wonder and worry about how I will fit it all in.