It Sucked the Life Out of Me

My first teaching job nearly ended my career and more

Photo by Carolina on Unsplash

Note: The story of my faith journey, church trauma, and spiritual abuse is inextricably linked to the stories of my parents and sisters, but this is my story. Their experiences, memories, and hurt are separate from my own and I do not speak for them. Details are also their own and not mine to share, and so I keep the details where they matter only to my own experiences.

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I slumped to the ground, the tears an unending stream down my face. I had held it together for months, but as I watched the student fall into the decrepit stand-alone shelf and the entire unit full of books collapse in front of me, the dam burst.

The bell rang for lunch and the classroom full of sophomores filed out to the gym/cafeteria. I held it together long enough to watch the last body leave, and then I was done.

How had my life come to this?

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I Went Into the Family Business

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With a job lined up for the following school year, Jeff and I drove back to Nebraska in May of 2002 so I could walk across the stage and officially graduate. I had survived four months of dragging myself to an introduction to Biology class at our local community college, my new husband pushing me out of the door more than once. In the short weekend back on campus, I discovered where many of my classmates were headed, most of us to places all over the country. If we didn’t exchange email addresses, it was very likely most of us wouldn’t hear from each other again. That is, not until Mark Zuckerberg invented this thing called Facebook and many of us hunted each other down online, eager to see what our college classmates had been up to since graduation.

I was so excited to start my first teaching job. I had dreams of what life would be like as the only English teacher in the building. I would be able to design my own curriculum, using everything I had learned over the previous five years of English, history, and education classes. And while one of my favorite history professors seemed a bit perturbed that I wouldn’t be teaching history, I assured him I would do everything I could to integrate it into my classroom.¹

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The school was about an hour and a half from Coloma, where I had spent the past several months substitute teaching to pay the bills before my college graduation. I drove back toward Chicago to pick up textbooks so I could start making plans for the following year. I would also take a look at what I had available for additional reading material for my new students.

When I truly saw my resources for the first time, I probably should have known to run away.

Two of the four textbooks I would need were ancient, and my novel selection for each course was slim. As a first-year teacher with no English teacher mentor in the building, I was building from scratch. I was replacing another first-year teacher who was certified in ESL, not English education. And while she was sweet and I enjoyed meeting her, she was leaving nothing useful for curriculum building.

And yet, I persisted. That summer, between babysitting for extra cash and planning for our move to Indiana, right over the Illinois border, I roughly scheduled out the year for each of my four classes. I decided what we were reading, how long it would take, and then figured I would work in writing between those units.

And then I started my school year.

I was a first-year teacher teaching four separate grade levels with a handful of supportive colleagues but no real mentor. My close friend Kevin was only a second-year teacher and still figuring out how to effectively teach all of the social studies classes under the same circumstances.

Then I discovered just how little my students had done the previous year in their English classes. Their teacher was sweet but had no training in teaching English Language Arts. The freshman hadn’t read anything longer than a Ray Bradbury short story all year, not even Romeo and Juliet. The sophomores and juniors had done some reading and writing, but at least their teacher before that had a reputation for being tough. They were ready for a challenge. The incoming freshmen would be fresh and moldable, but I still had to contend with incoming sophomores who loved their freshman English teacher, who didn’t want me to take over, and who hadn’t learned how to learn in the previous year.

It was only the start of my struggles.