It Was Everything I Wanted
My new teaching position was everything I wanted, but still required an adjustment
Walking through my faith deconstruction/reconstruction journey has required a lot of vulnerability. That is why there is a paywall below. If you want to support my writing but do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation. I will give you one month of access to all paid content.
The previous chapter
And now
“You sound so happy and light,” my friend Alicia said as we talked on the phone.
“I am,” I responded. And I was.
Our years in Fort Wayne, while difficult for me, also helped to transform my career. I loved graduate school and thrived as both a student and a teacher. Once I had my own high school classroom again, I dove into teaching AP Language, leaning into my passions and discovering a whole new world of pedagogic possibilities.
When I started my new position in a much bigger school with a much bigger faculty than what I had experienced in Indianapolis, I was a mom to a toddler and a newborn. The administration was perfectly content allowing me to just teach my classes without asking me to pick up extra-curricular activities. Once I was done with graduate school, I had more time than ever before to dedicate to my teaching craft. But graduate school and motherhood also softened my edges. I learned to have more patience and adjust as my students needed. Now in my 30s, I took on the teaching persona of “nurturing hardass,” which some of my former students highlighted when they wrote a poem about me in their senior English class.
I didn’t like Fort Wayne, but I loved my students. I wasn’t leaving them, or even the job I enjoyed. I just needed something different. I nearly cried when one class handed me a journal full of handwritten notes and a framed certificate naming me the “Patron Saint of Rhetoric.” I gave them my email address and told them to write me if they needed letters of recommendation, and I meant it. I didn’t want them to think I was moving halfway across the country to get away from them.
I just needed to get away, period.
