The teacher-mom train left the station three weeks ago and won’t slow down for months. My oldest started high school (how!?) with my youngest not far behind him, and my own head is swimming with 140 new names. It was not the smooth start I’d hoped for, and I feel like I’ve been thrown from a cliff and I’m still falling. This year feels different. The stakes are higher, and the tasks asked of me are larger - both at home and at work. When I spend the morning prepping afternoon stuff and sorting out what day of the week it is and who has to be where and when, it feels like I’ve already run a marathon by the time I arrive at work. Mom life is a full time job on top of another full time job that pays the bills.
The word capacity has been floating in my head for weeks now. It began in early July with this fabulous essay by Rebecca Woolf on women’s hetero-pessimism (as I’ve heard it called these days). Capacity was the word I’d been searching for but couldn’t find, and once she said it, I realized that’s exactly what I meant when I tried to say what I couldn’t quite name. As Woolf explains in that essay, “The topic of compassion being weaponized against women — both in and out of our marriages — is something Mindy and I talk about regularly in our workshops. But what also comes up is CAPACITY — a thing that most women I know have in spades. The ability to work, raise several children, maintain robust friendships and ALSO (are you ready for this?) text a man back.” Weaponized compassion, endless capacity, and weaponized incompetence are all related. And as I sit at the dawn of another school year, I’m rolling these things around in my mind and trying to discern what is necessary for the life I lead and what is simply a product of my own lack of boundaries and assertion, my own bad habits. The lines between the two are fuzzy. Expansive capacity and martyrdom are close cousins.
My final read of the summer before going back to work was the much-talked-about Liars by Sarah Manguso. It’s a dark tale of a dissolving marriage, but I loved it because of the ways it prompted me to examine this dance between capacity and martyrdom. Much like Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, you can feel that it’s only barely fiction, the smallest step from the author’s lived experience, written with a persona residing somewhere just an inch from memoir. She exposes hard truths she had to live to know. In that novel, the word capacity jumped out at me again when she says, “My God how I’d loved thinking about our long marriage. I’d loved thinking of myself as having the capacity for mature love, which I’d experienced as self-erasure and processed as achievement.”
This idea of capacity isn’t just about romantic relationships at all; it’s much bigger than that. There’s a dark side of capacity and a dim path that martyrdom brings - self-erasure processed as achievement as Manguso calls it. She’s talking about a marriage, and I’ve been there too, but right now I’m talking about a whole life as one small person in a world that leaves systemic issues on the shoulders of individuals. At one point Manguso’s narrator says, “I’d thought the marriage would improve, somehow, if I just improved myself. If I could essentially better myself, the fumes of betterment would form a medicinal cloud that would surround and improve my husband.” Ouch. Sub the word husband for family or students or school or community and you find the engine that runs inside of me that I’ve spent a lifetime politely calling intrinsic motivation. I always think If I can work just a little harder, I can improve myself and thus improve the situation, no matter how impossible it is. By the end of the book, I wanted to shake the protagonist by the shoulders and wake her up, tell her to walk away. Maybe the question I need to start asking myself is how do I know when to stop?
The air conditioning in my classroom was broken for the first week and a half of the school year. I tried to stick it out and lasted a few days with huge fans in there, but then I melted and gave up and spent most of my day floating from room to room to teach in spaces where it wasn’t suffocatingly hot. My school was doing what it could, but the issue was bigger than that. There were other AC problems across the district, and I was waiting in line. It was sweaty and smelly and gross. Moving classroom spaces is better than sitting in humid stench all day with thirty teenagers, but it carries its own difficulties too when the first weeks of school are so important for establishing community and routine in your classroom. In the midst of all of that, I was giving diagnostic assessments to see what kids knew, instructing AP students on how to write critical analysis for their first graded assignment, and dealing with an intense personality conflict between students who have a hard time with emotional regulation. I had to roll with it and make it work because what else can you do? But the whole time I kept thinking about how many people outside of the teaching world would just walk right out after hardly an hour and never come back. How many people have no clue what public education teachers do in this country everyday. How much capacity we have. How little capacity others could muster to hold what we hold.
I’m at a great school, exceptional really. It’s surrounded by houses I could not afford to live in. I teach highly resourced kids who are destined for success, and I chat with PTA moms in the hallways or the media center because they have the leisure time and interest to volunteer at school. But even so, it’s a public school with a wide socioeconomic range and diversity in every way. And public school anywhere means there are days of broken air conditioning and slow repairs, lunch meetings and 7:30am duties, classrooms where I need to remember remedial needs and gifted students and language-learners and autism spectrum disorder and social emotional needs and ADHD and dyslexia and anxiety, all in the same room at the same time. And somehow stay sane myself.
I’m still getting their names wrong sometimes, still learning who they are. For a first assignment in some of my classes, I asked them to write their own version of a Clint Smith poem called “Something You Should Know.” This year my schedule really runs the full spectrum of abilities. I’ve given that assignment in advanced classes in years past and received thoughtful lines of figurative language and imagination with clouded similes, but for a couple of hours a day this year, I’m teaching a different crowd which is such an important reminder about the wide variety of experiences held in the walls of a public school. They don’t even attempt to dress it up. Who needs metaphor when you have lines like this? There are many things I did that now make me fear. / Covid and war happened to my country, and I moved three times. / I lived with my grandma most of my life and life was kind of a struggle. / I never talk to anyone. I don’t know why I am so shy, I wish I wasn’t. / I have to succeed to lead the family. / I’ve lived fast. I still do. / I am still the same old me. They don’t even believe in poetry, but it doesn’t matter. These lines cut like little knives.
I’m learning student stories a little bit at a time. One who’s moved five times in two years. One who survived a malignant brain tumor. One who lives in a house with so many siblings he never gets to talk. Two who have relatively recently lost a parent. Dozens who feel the immense pressure of parental expectations. One who asks too many questions because she is grade-obsessed and has to understand instructions forward and backward before she begins, and another one who hasn’t said a word to me and can’t look me in the eye.
The world of public education can feel like a brick wall blocking the exact path you need to walk to get to your destination. That brick wall almost always begins and ends with underfunding. I need smaller class sizes to teach more effectively. Too bad, no room in the budget to hire more teachers. I need AC in my classroom. Too bad, only a few contractors to serve the district, and you’re pretty far down the list, wait it out. Kids need food in the summer. Too bad, your governor declined federal funds available to feed them.
Can you believe how quickly we’ve all forgotten the panic of early Covid days when public schools couldn’t operate for a few months? All of the rhetoric about teachers as heroes. All of the praise when people suddenly realized that public schools are the cornerstone the rest of American life is built upon. We teach kids, sure. We also feed them. We provide a safe space for them to be away from home. We enable the 40-hour work week to happen by caring for kids as their parents work. We report signs of abuse and serve as an outside eye on children who otherwise have no one looking out for them. Schools offer psychological services and social-emotional learning. We use public schools as a solution to nearly every issue in this country. Academics is only one piece of the puzzle.
In the weeks since Harris announced her choice of Tim Walz, the internet is full of chatter about his past as a high school teacher. As a teacher myself, it’s been illuminating for me to read these memes and editorials. Some are perplexed he can be successful in politics after years of engaging high school kids all day, as though it’s not the exact same skills– to read a room and convince skeptical people to listen to you. Some people make jokes about how old he looks and how rapidly years of teaching must age you. Some are outraged he thinks schools should offer food and tampons for free. Most people are charmed by his history because there’s a belief in this country that teachers are humble public servants. I certainly felt like one lately, sweating in a crowded room and working in triage-mode trying to shuffle kids to better spaces and look them in the eye and guide them gracefully to a new year. But we are more than public servants. We are professionals with skills and a capacity exponentially larger than nearly anyone else in America. That’s the truth of it no one ever recognizes, and if I wasn’t so exhausted from shouldering all of this, it would infuriate me that no one sees it.
I’ve taught in university classrooms, private schools, private tutoring settings, and public school. But I didn’t dream of being a teacher when I was a little kid. The year after I finished undergrad, I worked in a corporate law firm because I was good at writing and speaking, and law school was the more lucrative path others encouraged me to pursue. But I couldn’t bear the thought of days without some kind of purpose that related to literature. I’m perhaps an unusual case in that I didn’t start teaching because I love kids but because I love language, and I can’t imagine a life without reading and writing everyday. I could do anything with these skills, and I know it. I choose to be here. I’m not a martyr or a meme.
I read an interview with Sarah Manguso before I read Liars, and she said yes the book is about the lies of a marriage that ended in betrayal, but it’s also about how society lied to her by promising that marriage had reached a new age where men and women carry equal burdens. Society lied to me about that, too. Even with an expansive capacity, I reached my limit and began to crack under the weight of marriage. But I didn’t see I was cracking until years later, in the rearview. Capacity can be so enticing; it makes you feel important and proud, so accomplished and valued. I don’t want to do that again. I don’t want to begin to crack without seeing it.
Of all the quotable lines in the novel that left me scribbling in the margins, there is one image I will never forget. The protagonist confesses to the reader that “Without meaning to, I began to restrict the material in my diary. I had become unable to articulate certain feelings. And so my body became their cultivation dish.” When I read that, I remembered a moment stepping into the bathtub a decade ago, in that year I felt so lost from myself. I was withering but couldn’t see that I was; I couldn’t admit it. My body was a cultivation dish indeed, exhaustion and sadness and distance, and underneath that, some kind of festering rage I didn’t admit to. I remember glancing in the mirror and not recognizing my frame, the ways all of those feelings were eating me alive. A capacity that expanded to hold everything it was given, but I shrunk so much that I left myself.
This isn't my diary, but it’s close. And this is my attempt at articulating whatever it is I’m feeling so that my body doesn’t become a cultivation dish this time around. I wear my everything-is-fine-and-I’m-so-happy-to-see-you face for students, because that’s what you do to make them feel welcome and safe. But underneath that face, like moving depths under a smooth frozen lake, there is something else here. It feels like overwhelm and weariness, and maybe beneath that, I’d find burning embers of anger. I cried when I got home on Friday afternoon of my first week of school, and it was that kind of tears that physically hurt when they come out because you’ve built a dam to contain them. I didn’t cry because I hate my job or I’m going to quit. I love my job despite its immense challenges. But I cried because it’s hard and no one outside of this system understands just how hard or even cares to understand it. It feels a whole lot like weaponized incompetence, but it’s not a man telling me he’s not good at loading the dishwasher. It’s an entire political system and culture that just shrugs its shoulders and tells us it doesn’t know what to do to fix the problem. Here’s an idea: properly fund education and vote for people who do. Speak up when someone disparages public education or teachers. Recognize that without public schools, the whole country falls apart. Treat teachers like professionals. Listen to us. Value us with more than your words.
Every student has a story, so many stories that it’s hard to hold them all. But I’m a story, too. I’m a whole person with a capacity ten times larger than anyone I know, but even that has its limits. Every year, when resources become slimmer and challenges are bigger, I stretch my arms as far as they can reach, then stretch them again, even farther. Teachers aren’t martyrs. We are people with skills you hardly understand or recognize, people with whole lives outside of the classroom and eyes that have seen more than you can ever imagine. We can run laps around anyone else, in any field, at any moment. If one day even we can’t hold all of this, who will?