As a second year middle school teacher myself, I remember being scared of the teacher down the hall.
Literally, scared.
While classes changed, this veteran teacher would stomp down the hall like a commander on a mission, never making eye contact, much less even acknowledging, the existence of we lowly newbie-teachers who were standing at classroom doors, ushering students inside.
During staff meetings, she became the aggressive hunter, taking shots at whichever colleague was brave enough to peek above the hedge with a new idea not congruent to her own or an honest question she, of course, already had the answer for.
“No, that won’t work!” “I tried that twenty years ago!” “Don’t you know that?”
I remember cringing when I walked past her classroom and would hear her railing students– with a sharpness in her voice reminding me of Ms. Hannigan’s in Annie. And I would find myself on the way to the copier, suddenly wanting to become Daddy Warbucks, whisking students out of the prison that was their 3rd period math.
And all year long, I saw her roll her eyes at students as they walked down the hall, watched her eat lunch at a table with a virtual “veteran teachers only” sign on it, and saw her leave school many days far before the hands hit 3:30, officially releasing we teachers to our afternoons {seems even the principal was scared}.
And while I am {fairly} confident she knew her students’ names, she never learned mine–
the second year teacher, struggling to figure it out, three doors down.
And I understand that she only had one year left until retirement and that she was tired of constant testing and ungraded papers and disrespectful students. 25 years in the classroom will do that to a person, I’m sure. Essentially, she was enduring the final months before she could begin enjoying an August without setting up a classroom or learning the state’s new ideas for higher end-of-year scores.
And perhaps she started out with hopeful optimism to shape the next generation, but what I saw she ended up with was only a shell of all of that
– a powerfully negative force in the public school system that perhaps was doing more damage than good.
And I honestly remember asking myself, “Is that how a career in education turns out?”
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Do you know a teacher like that? How do you fight teacher-burnout?
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