“… it is utterly impossible for over-worked teachers to preserve an instinctive liking for children; they are bound to come to feel towards them as the proverbial confectioner’s apprentice does towards macaroons. I do not think that education ought to be anyone’s whole profession: it should be undertaken for at most two hours a day by people whose remaining hours are spent away from children.”—Bertrand Russell from Education and Discipline

I didn’t want to get there. I have explored options and considered alternatives.

It was the end of Winter Term and the beginning of my last spring as a full time teacher. A former student who wanted to write and perhaps also to teach, asked me if I would enter the teaching profession again? Did I have regrets? I suppose the easiest answer would be to suggest posts about teaching on my blog. Without denying the challenges, it was been a great career. I loved teaching and I am deeply grateful for the opportunities teaching has given me to develop writing skills, to work with students, and to contribute meaningfully to the world.

My former student acknowledged that “education is something that’s extremely important and I think that high school is the most crucial age to reach out to students.”

Yes, I feel that. I feel commitment and love for my students. I recall all too vividly what and who I was in high school, and the common lie about it being the “best time of life” when for me it was lonely and frightening, and I am fortunate to have survived. Unlike most of the teachers at my school, I did not love sport and I did not turn to teaching as a way of prolonging my own student experience. I came to teaching out of compassion for those terrible years of becoming.

I have no regrets. I have loved teaching. I enjoyed the challenges to my intelligence, innovation, and certainty. I made many mistakes on my way to wisdom.

But I did not begin wisely. I entered teaching with the same foolish notions shared by many others.

• I thought I was a natural at teaching. (not a chance)
• I thought it would be easy. (oh dear)
• I was a visual artist and thought teaching would leave me time to create. (ha!)
• Vacations and summers off! (ha!)
• The pay for my area is good. (not so much)
• Job security, good pension, sabbatical. (gone)

Fortunately, I outgrew these notions, accepted my mistakes, and loved my job before I became too discouraged to continue.

Would I enter teaching now? She asked me this as I struggled to carve out a week of space in the Spring Term for the new achievement test designed to rank students, teachers, and their schools. Fortunately, these tests would be phased in over the next three years—that is, there were alternative paths for students seeking to graduate other than passing that test. No administrator I knew fought this or even talked publicly against it. I suspect they all hoped, as did most teachers, that the test would go away. Perhaps its replacements will. But thus far, despite my skepticism about the accuracy of test score, I am sorry to discover my former school has lost ranking.

In the mean time, while I was there, required testing limited what I could do with juniors that spring. It stole time and energy and attention. It caused distress, and in the end it proved almost nothing. Even if students do well on the test, no matter if they failed, more than a hundred years of experience with high stakes testing via the SAT reveals what any sensible person knows: Teachers still do a better job of evaluating accomplishment and predicting future success than any test. What I recorded in my grade book was a more accurate evaluation.

Nevertheless, we have lost faith in teachers. The pension system is somewhat gutted, but then this is the trend across our nation as unions have been axed and the middle class attacked. There was a golden period, and had I been teaching while my sons were little I might have retired with a pension that more closely reflected my current earnings. Or I could have been a university football coach, the one The Oregonian likes to cite when attacking my pension. The newest pension system, the one teachers now have, is even weaker than mine was when I started. I could not begin to retire with twenty-five years with only the current pension system. I am not sure I could ever afford to retire. The pension was something I looked forward to during bad days when I was scaling by: At least I had my pension  As a person inclined to worry about money, I do have fears about being alone and destitute at the age of eighty, when the funds from my more recent pension will run out.

Would I have entered teaching if the education landscape looked like what it does today? Perhaps. I would have been wiser to choose another career path. I was good at the job, I think, and I loved it. But about half of the people who enter teaching—even before the recent changes to pension, job security, and testing—leave within a few years. This doesn’t happen in other nations. In most nations teachers leave teaching about as often as plumbers leave plumbing or lawyers leave the law. Education here is tougher: American students are poorer, our school days are longer, the total student load (the number of students seen each day by a teacher) is higher. Job security and a strong pension are gone. Other perks of the profession disappeared early in my teaching career—tenure and sabbaticals are a memory in my state. All of that make education more challenging for students and teachers. 

My term teaching as a student, my practicum, was completed under Field Advisor Hazel Koenig and Lynn Gray as my Field Teacher. Two extraordinary women helped me to grow and also to find my first job as an Art teacher. fifteen years later, I took a lot of classroom management workshops and graduate classes once I was hired as an English teacher and thus shifted subject areas. 

It was lucky for me in terms of personal growth, not so fortunate in other ways.

The energy to create my own art—whether that was visual or written—and to work with students seems to come from a similar place. John Gardner warns beginning writers about this in On Becoming a Novelist. More recently, in the first chapter of her newest collection of essays, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Ann Patchett writes about this too. By the time she’d spent a week working with students on their writing she had no energy left for her own so she tried to wait tables, also exhausting. Finally she chose journalism and in that profession she learned both to write to order and to let go of words.

Nevertheless, the way I came to think of myself as a writer came through teaching writing. I have written several novels and I have managed to publish fiction, poems, and nonfiction while also teaching full time. This is, shall we say, an unusual accomplishment. And it has likely been achieved at the expense of doing my best in any area. 

Most summers—for all but three in the last years I spent in the classroom—I was in school and planning curriculum and often working part time as well during those ten weeks “off.” For the other three summers I was merely planning curriculum. I woke at five in the morning and was frequently still answering emails from students until I shut my laptop down at around nine in the evening. I regularly received requests from graduates to forward class materials on MLA form and résumés and to edit graduate school applications  or all three inside a week). I am not complaining. On the contrary, I am pleased that former students still think of me at all.

It has never been easy and I wasn’t good at my job for the first years’ teaching. I had bad days and failures. There were many days when I think of myself and my life as a teacher and I am profoundly grateful. Sometimes I think of myself as a writer, but perhaps that will change. Most things have. 

But I liked my students, and I liked them right through to the end of my career.