‘I WAS RAISED TO SHOW UP’
“Glutton for punishment. I don't know why that doesn't get me down. There's times, I mean, I've been frustrated.”
“Last year (…) I had a bad observation where I felt like, ‘How could this principal, who's known me for the last eight years, say these things? He knows I'm a good teacher.’ That was really hard. But at the end of the day—I don't know. Maybe I was raised to show up. I'm gonna show up. I was raised to show up. My mom was […] hardcore. If you didn't show up—that was not an option. You showed up.”
“I work in a building with thirty-five other grownups, and there's like six of us that do everything, which is frustrating, because it's a lot. I'm exhausted a lot and I need help a lot, and I usually don't get the help that I need. But that said, at the end of the day I will show up for that middle school dance, because I know it'll bring happiness to those kids.”
“My husband and I both started as Education majors. He was a Biology teacher at the same high school where I was an English teacher, and when we finished the two years [there], he's like, ‘I'm out. This is not for me.’ [….] He thought he would like it and he hated it. He couldn't deal with the bureaucracy, the admin, the parents. And my personality is like, ‘Okay, these are just parts of the blanket that I've got to shuffle, that I’ve got to fluff out every day. It gets a little wrinkled. You’ve gotto fluff it out. It's always going to have wrinkles, but it's still there. It's the blanket.”
A GROUP OF COLLEAGUES
“There's a group of wonderful teachers that I'm friends with. It's the five other teachers that do everything [at the school]. We do everything together. They're all younger than me. All their babies are all younger. So they're at a different stage, where I get to tell them, ‘Don't volunteer for this one. Go and be with your kids. This is your turn to do that. You've already done that.’ It's kind of nice. I like being […] the oldest sister anyway, so it kind of fits my personality.”
“We made like a little family for ourselves (….) One year I had a really difficult student who just he made me cry like I hadn't cried in twenty years. I was in the Guidance Office crying three days a week because this kid—I couldn't connect with him. It was like oil and water. Having those teachers to have lunch with saved me because—I don't know, that was a rough year. I got through it, though, and that kid and I get along fine now.”