Today I was talking with a co-worker whom I’ll admit I don’t know well, but whom I had just had lunch with, and someone happened to mention career paths. I asked said co-worker if he planned on being a teacher forever and he said no. I asked if he had any other career goals in mind. He bristled at the question and refused to answer. It was really awkward. I didn’t put him on the spot and he has no reason to feel any guilt trips or pushiness coming from me, so I don’t really understand the sudden reticence. He went on to say, “I can’t tell you. I barely know you. You’re practically a stranger.” He’d better already have started intensive secret agent training, because there’s no reason he can’t tell me he’s going back to school to get an MBA or learn to cook or something.
Geez.
So many people at I.S. 666 are in transition. I know people who are in New York to be with a spouse or significant other. I know people who are teaching, because they just got out of college with a liberal arts degree and entered a program that enables them to gain teacher certification. I know older people who have been at the school since “before it got so bad.” (Was this before or after the heyday of M.C. Hammer)? And there’s me. I wanted to move to New York and “make a difference.” It wasn’t entirely a line, but yeah, I overestimated how much I could do with some liberal sensitivity and my B.A. in English.
Do people stay at low-performing, inner-city schools because they love to teach…or because they have no other options? Where do we go after this? Somehow I imagine leaving this environment will be easier said than done. I’ll still have kid germs in my body, the overuse of the word “mad” in my vocabulary, and dreams - I mean, nightmares - about the stinkbombs, yelling, and substandard work.
I like the idea that surviving a year of this experience makes me a ninja of sorts. I know how to make do in an environment with scarce resources. I know all the right things to holla in a verbal altercation. I know how to sympathize with the downtrodden without excusing their insubordination or continuation in vicious cycles of violence, crime, and poverty. I know how bad it can get and how to laugh when it does. I know now, more than ever, how much I have flourished in my life, because of the family I have and where I come from.
But for now I am here with my self-conscious lunchmate and a bevy of other co-workers. We bob in the polluted waters of idealism, fatigue, and student loan debt. We don’t know what’s waiting us ashore - families of our own, a better school, an entirely different career path? But we bob, lost, but not entirely lost, in transition.
