Recently I was given the opportunity to attend an event for a national teachers’ sorority. The invite came to me through misadventure, and it was only on a whim that I agreed to go. In the weeks leading up, when my housemates asked me about the event on the calendar, I had almost no information to share with them in terms of details. On the morning of the event, I showed up twenty minutes late, after sitting in the parking lot for thirty.
In hindsight, however, I had no reason to worry. The woman who had invited me made sure I felt as welcome among these women whom I’d never met as I would have if I’d been a member for twenty years. In a room full of teachers, I can always find something to talk about—there’s really no new classroom experience under the sun—and the event was an annual celebration, so the mood couldn’t have been merrier. By the end, I was struck with a familiar inclination—that teaching is a profession that is meant to be lifelong, but for too many nowadays, it gets cut brutally short.
But it was a phrase around the middle of the event’s program that stayed with me, spoken by a sister who had just celebrated her thirtieth year of membership. She asked (in my opinion) a poorly broad question, intended to get the members present to reflect: Do you know the history of our Founder’s Day?
A murmur around the room revealed that most knew the general idea, but few could recall the exact details of their sorority’s founding, which is understandable. Outside the context of that room, why would it matter? But it was that question that reminded me why I had been doubtful about joining a teacher’s sorority, outside of the fact that I was about fifty years younger than the average member.
Like any good social studies teacher knows, the history we choose to remember matters, and the manner in which we remember it is equally revealing. Looking around the room of mostly white, mostly middle-class, mostly elderly women, I had little room to wonder what this same sorority might have looked like in the year it was founded, and—indeed—in the seventy-nine years it’s existed since then. I won’t deny that there was plenty in that room worth celebrating that day, and plenty of history besides, but not all history is worth celebrating. We’ve never had to be so careful.
I find myself doing similar cognitive work when I reflect on my first year of teaching, now that I’m several months into my second. Now that I have no overwhelming terror to keep me constant company, no voice inside my head to tell me I’m doing everything wrong, no reminder to feel guilty over things that are not my fault, I find myself slowly beginning again. I’m free to feel whole.
It’s a beautiful feeling, but a strangely naked one. In the absence of being a failure, I wonder what it is I’m called to be? After a year of pure and eviscerating depression, I find I often don’t know how to feel enjoyment anymore without strangling it within an inch of its life.
To move forward, for me, is to let go of those memories and re-start the clock. I don’t have a prayer of lasting a lifetime—or even this year—if I don’t learn to let some history fade away. Teaching will always bring days you wish you never had to live through. You have to be careful they don’t become the days you treasure most.
Talking to the women at Founder’s Day, I found that every experience I had had in my first year of teaching was not singular to me. The student who threw a hydro flask at my head. The seventh graders who can’t read. The principals who only want to see you fail. The manner in which they could discuss it all amazed me. Not an ounce of bitterness; entirely at peace with some of the worst moments of their lives.
What is it about teachers—good, strong teachers who’ve lasted decades in their career without losing the passion—and their somewhat selective memory of the good and the bad? If we let the bad memories crowd out the good, we risk leaving the profession forever. But if we overly romanticize the bad—as I seem to find myself doing constantly—we may risk something even more dire.
I first fell in love with education because of its ability to transform. My younger self was constantly overwhelmed by the realization of ever more societal problems, but I loved how teachers could meet such problems in a creative space that made them seem smaller. More manageable. Not gone, but workable. The beauty of teaching was that it presented the opportunity to tackle just about every problem that tugged at my heart (as they beautifully describe them in the musical Suffs: “too many weary minds and hearts…too many children with sad eyes…too many souls that die before the body does”). But a profession that fights every societal battle is bound to give out. Particularly when we aren’t given the resources we need to survive.
I remember being a senior in high school watching my mentor teacher pull solutions out of thin air for students who masqueraded as statistics. She could motivate even the most unwilling children, and everyone felt safe with her. In the months I spent in her classroom, I wove my dream for my life: to be exactly like her. She would have fit right in among the women of Founder’s Day.
Alicia Keys was right when she named “young teachers” the “underdogs.” We face it all without the decades of experience to protect us. We snap and throw chairs at the students and get fired. We feel our hair fall out in the shower and watch new lines appear from the stress. We trade our own fading childhood to parent the kids we’re handed who need it more. And we hardly ever stay more than a few years.
I suppose the real challenge I felt facing me at that Founder’s Day is this: how do I let go of my personal pain from my years of teaching without losing my keen understanding of why the work matters? And how can we as teachers unflinchingly make our needs known—to lawmakers, to administrators, to public opinion—without driving away the young hopefuls that look at us and see superheroes?
The history we choose to remember matters. In a twisted way, we must remember the days that are most challenging, not just because they haunt us nightly. If we erase the work that teachers really do, we risk going another seventy-nine years without a living wage, with class sizes that aren’t sustainable.
I still don’t know if I’ll end up joining. To be honest, I’ve never really been a joiner. I hate labels and the assumptions people can make based on limited information. But as I get older, I get lonelier. And I loved how it felt to be surrounded by women who faced it all and stayed.
The only reason we really teach history, after all, is to become something better from its pieces. To create a new sisterhood of teachers who look like every child we serve. To never back down as our profession gets continually shunted, overlooked, underpaid, forgotten. To honor the older teachers who showed us the way, letting go of any temptation to compare ourselves to their years of experience. To love every child even when they make it so hard. To teach when education is the last thing on anyone’s mind.
Do I know the history of my own classroom? Yes. God help us, let’s make something better.
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