August doesn’t suck anymore!

The first time I “quit teaching”, I’d only been at it for 5 years and was living in a town that was a three and a half hour drive from where I grew up. I actually loved it there for the most part–it was the first time I’d really been on my own long enough to start figuring out who I was and who I wanted to be. I was teaching with incredible people in a fantastic school district with tons of community support. I had bought a house, and had been in the community long enough to make some good friends and secure my place on a rec league volleyball team. I was also trying out the online dating scene, and had been seeing a guy who lived even further away from my hometown than I did. I related most of this to a high school friend at the wedding reception of another high school friend, and when I told her that I was dating this guy, but that I didn’t think it would probably go anywhere because he planned to stay where he was and I eventually wanted to move closer to home, she basically asked me why I was wasting my time with him. Now, I know that there are all kinds of people in the world, and that not everybody dates with the intention of finding a life partner, but I was getting to the point in my oh-so-mature mid-to-late twenties that I thought I was ready to start looking to “settle down” with someone, whatever that means.

So that conversation planted a seed in my head. Later that school year, I found out that the district was going to have to cut their budget and that someone in my department, with less seniority than I, might lose her job when she had just moved back to her hometown. I decided that it must be a sign that I should leave this town (where I had started to grow so much as a person), submitted a letter of resignation and, at the end of the school year, moved (with my cat) into a fifth wheel camper in my parents’ driveway while I tried to sell my house. The year was 2010…

I had closed on my house in 2008 which, you history buffs will recall, was right around the time the housing bubble spectacularly burst. Lucky for me, I’d at least had the foresight NOT to buy a house that was way out of my price range. I’d actually been pre-approved for a $100,000 mortgage, which I thought was too much to pay, especially considering I was in a small town in rural Iowa, and could get a nice starter home for much less. But I’d still paid $65,000 for a little two-bedroom house with an attached garage on a corner lot. It was perfect–I loved it. But I’d gotten this $65,000 mortgage with $0 down, (because that was a thing then) so, even though I’d been paying extra towards the principal every month, I hadn’t built much equity. After about five months of living in that camper and another five months living in my parents’ basement (when it got too cold outside to stay in the camper), the house finally sold…for $60,000. I borrowed money to pay closing costs and was happy to be done with it. But that year of living with my parents, paying the mortgage on a house I wasn’t living in, and paying to COBRA my health insurance (because I was denied individual health insurance) while working as a substitute teacher and a hostess at a restaurant, had broken me a little bit, emotionally and financially. I decided I needed to go back to teaching, mainly for the salary and benefits, but also to feel a little more in control of my life, and I found a job teaching in another, much smaller district that was only about 45 miles from my hometown.

This was another huge growth experience for me. Where I’d taught before, I’d had so much support from other teachers–I was pretty much always teaching the same thing as someone else, and they were kind enough to just let me copy what they were doing, so my planning skills were essentially nonexistent. At this new job, I was the only teacher in my department, which was amazing in that I could basically build my curriculum from the ground up, but really hard in that…I was basically building my curriculum from the ground up. I did use a LOT of resources from the last district I’d taught in, but I also changed things to make it work better for me. My first two years teaching there, I spent most of my time either at school working on things or at home (in a rented house) working on school things. I felt good about the job I was doing, and even traveled internationally with twelve students. It was during this trip out of the country over summer break that I first learned that a parent had complained to the school because his kid had failed my class.

I don’t want to go into too much detail, but the situation went from the school board and administration initially telling me that they supported me, to the interim superintendent “strongly encouraging” me to give the kid “another opportunity to pass” when the parent threatened to sue the school district. So, I compromised my beliefs, gave the kid “another opportunity to pass”, and decided that I didn’t really want to be in a place where the real lesson this kid learned was that, even if you were warned many times by your teacher that you needed to get it together because you were dangerously close to failing, if you chose NOT to take all of those opportunities to improve, but then cried loud enough and got lawyers involved, you could still probably get what you wanted. I’m not saying I’m totally blameless in the situation–I probably should have contacted the parents to let them know the kid might fail, but I really didn’t think I needed to since I always kept grades updated online then, and I expected that they would have received a D/F notice at midterm, as was the school’s policy. Honestly, I think it was the parent and not the kid who was the real problem–the kid made mistakes, sure, but also seemed really uncomfortable and embarrassed about all of it. But that incident kicked off my real disillusionment with the system and, although I stayed in the district for two years after that, my heart just wasn’t in it anymore. I felt like I had worked so hard and given so much, but that it didn’t really matter in the long run. So after those two additional years, I decided to leave the friends I’d made there and “quit teaching” for the second time.

At this point, I decided that I should pursue a few different things for work and eventually build up several income streams to support myself instead of relying on one full-time job. It started out well–I was substitute teaching again and, thanks to some friends, also had the opportunity to do in-home behavioral health intervention with kids through a counseling center. I was looking into doing other things, too, when The Bearded One (I’ve decided that’s how I’ll refer to my husband in the blog for now) entered the picture. As often happens when one meets the person one wants to eventually marry, I spent lots of time getting to know him and just kind of quit working on my other income ideas. (I can’t really blame him for my getting distracted…but the timeline does match up. 😉)

So, I decided to go back to teaching, yet again, mainly for the salary and benefits. This time I was in a fairly large school district, with fantastic colleagues, but I just wasn’t in it. There were certainly moments, sometimes even full days or stretches of days, when I was happy there, but I almost always felt guilty, either because I was spending lots of time outside of school working on school things and neglecting the rest of my life, or because I wasn’t working on school things outside of school and was, consequently, behind. Plus, I didn’t like who I was as a teacher a lot of the time anymore–I wasn’t nearly as organized, I didn’t have as much patience as I used to with students, and I never felt like I was giving even half as much to the job and to my students as I needed to. So, here I am: I quit teaching again. I think this time it might stick, though. I now have a part-time job (through which I can get benefits) that provides me with almost enough income to pay my bills, and when I’m spending time with The Bearded One (or other family/friends), I don’t have to feel guilty about not doing school work. And, for the first time in a very long time, I’m really working on figuring out what else I want to do with my life.

Now it’s August, and I keep seeing my teacher friends’ posts on Facebook about getting ready to go back to school, and how the first couple weeks of August just feel like a looong Sunday night (which is absolutely true when you’re a teacher). But this year, August still feels like summer to me, and for that (and for many other things) I’m so grateful. Melody Beattie (who has apparently written several self-help books, of which I’ve read none) wrote in, The Language of Letting Go: Hazelden Meditation Series:

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. It turns problems into gifts, failures into successes, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. It can turn an existence into a real life, and disconnected situations into important and beneficial lessons. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” (*boldface added by me for emphasis)

As I move forward, I believe that by practicing gratitude for what I have (which, really, is SO much already), my confusion about what paths to pursue will turn to clarity and a vision for my future. I hope I’ll encounter many strangers who will turn into friends. And I’m certain that my life will be filled to overflowing.