Its  not the first time I have wanted to quit teaching.  My teaching career started at a small middle school in the Bronx ,and in my first year of teaching I felt overwhelmed by so many parts of the job it would be hard to distill them into a list or even a diatribe. Though if pressed it is perhaps most honest to say that having come from a pretty strong track record of academic success, I simply didn’t understand failure and was pretty uncomfortable getting close to it, much less having to try and fix it.   I got over my inability to understand how my students could manage to be so hostile in the face of knowing so little in part by taking hip hop dance classes.   I have less rhythm than even my appearance would suggest, and the first time I stormed out of the middle of  a class, it became pretty crystal clear what was happening when students were stymied by fractions with unlike denominators.

In my second year of teaching, I tore everything off my bulletin boards and intended to quit during Christmas break on account of our partner institution deciding to revamp everyone’s schedules with little regard for how these changes would impact the already designed curricula and students goals. My schedule changed from 3 90 minute sessions of science to 4  one hour sessions of science and two 40 minute  minute reading classes.  Our English teachers weren’t making gains with student literacy- the end result was that several of us content teachers had to teach more.  Meanwhile my science program was on track to have a significant portion of the 6th grade class pass the High School Regents Living Environment course.  For my success, they slashed 33% of my teaching time per section and instead asked me to go from managing 75 students to 100.  I also had to figure out how to teach two reading courses.  It didn’t seem fair, and it took me a whole Christmas vacation to remember it wasn’t about fair.  It was about not bailing on my students.

My third year of teaching I decided to try a large traditional middle school.  I went to work at a middle school in Chinatown.  Some of my classes had 37 students in them. I taught over 130 students that year, and it was a really shift to be in such an impersonal environment. The classes were so large that sometimes I could barely see from one end of my classroom to the other.

The school had also recently decided to  break into academies to create a more intimate feel in the larger school, but when they did the dividing the also chose to push most of their special ed kids into one academy.  Guess which academy I happened to be teaching in? The end result was the 7th grade from hell.  These students were so bad that not single teacher who taught them didn’t resort to some sort of substance use- legal or illegal, prescribed or “borrowed” to the dull the pain of teaching a class that was in revolt from day one.

The whole team struggled all year with these students- I was actually lucky that the bulk of my schedule was made up of 8th grade classes which hadn’t been put together in quite as unbalanced a way.  7th grade team meetings felt like suicide prevention support group meetings.  By the second half of the year, there was never a meeting where someone didn’t cry.  The teachers consistently suggested action plans to reshape student behavior which often got shutdown or undermined by the principal.   Finally in MAY, they gave us time to do an intervention.  For a whole week the students were no longer allowed to travel the halls, we staffed it such that there was never any less than 3 adults in the room.  We provided sessions on positive communication, goal setting and conflict resolution.  We also offered high interest lessons and a clear incentive program, but this was one week in May.  Had we had the opportunity to do this at the beginning of the school year like we had asked for numerous times maybe the year could have been re-framed and saved, but by May it was little more than a social experiment.

In my fourth and final year of teaching in NYC, I moved to a beautiful K-8 school with and amazing view of the East River.  It was the most aesthetically appealing school building I could have ever imagined- there was actual art in the hallways, and a full music program in place.  I was excited about the opportunity to work in a K-8 setting.  I thought that is might be really helpful to teach students who already had a strong school culture, but it turned out that the principal- having never taught above 2nd grade and the assistant principals having never taught past 4th were terrified of the middle school.  They literally never even stepped foot on the 4th floor which housed the oldest and of course rowdiest students.  The classes sizes in the lower grades were often 16-20, but I had 38 sixth graders in one class and 37 8th graders.  I also taught two sections of 7th grade, and on the day before school started I noticed an extra class on my schedule.  It turned out I was also going to teach a special education self-contained class of 12 students ranging in age from 10-15, but with literacy levels from kindergarten through fifth grade.

So when I decided  to move to California,  I was realistic enough to know not to hope for a better school  situation- I was just looking for better weather and a chance to broaden my own world past the East Coast.  I considered private school options, but wound up staying the course with regard to my commitment to urban education.  I landed at a small middle school in East Oakland.  I was fortunate to get a job at one of the better schools in that area.  So far none of the kids have hit any of the teachers, and there has only been one death threat leveled at a teacher.  I am teaching Algebra to about 70 8th graders, and about 70% of my kids are below grade level- many still haven’t mastered 2nd or 3rd grade level math, but its my job to teach them Algebra.  Most days I am not sure I want this job.  I look at the classifieds every night and think about how I would feel about not seeing them again, about what it might mean if I bailed on them right now.  I am exhausted from 12 hour days at the school followed by weekends of planning and grading or  Saturday school interventions for our most behind kids.

I got into teaching through the NYC Teaching Fellows Program, a program designed to help address the teaching shortage.  Some of the people in my original cohort never made it through the first month.  Many others have left the teaching or at least teaching in an urban setting.   Richard Ingersoll along with other researchers have argued for years the it is not so much a teacher shortage problem as a teacher retention problem.  Data suggests that within the first five years nearly half of all teachers leave the profession.  The rates are higher in urban settings and in high need subject areas.  So here I am about to fall on one end of the statistic or the other.  I am in my fifth year of teaching in urban settings in high need subject areas and I want to quit, but I also have plans to go into school tomorrow on a Saturday to tutor a student who missed a lot of school due to illness. This is isn’t typical quitting behavior.  People who want to leave their jobs don’t volunteer to work Saturdays for free.  I am in a word conflicted.  I don’t know  what I will end up deciding.

I can tell you my Friday scramble through the halls at 4:30 looking for some sort of sign, ended with a conversation with a first year teacher.  I listened to her talk about how different teaching was than she had expected and how overwhelmed she felt.  We talked about the structure of her lessons and how she could increase her effectiveness as an instructor.  We both agreed that we spend almost all of the little free time we do have thinking about our students and our classes.  We both agreed that we adored our students despite their often hostile or  unpleasant behavior.  We both left the building reluctantly just before 7 on a Friday, thinking of all that needed to be done.

For more on teacher retention:

The Wrong Solutions to the Teacher Shortage- Ingersoll and Smith

Unraveling the Teacher Shortage Problem: Teacher Retention is Key- National Commission on Teaching and America’s future