On the floor of our home office sits a box. It's one of those cardboard boxes that printer paper comes in, but presently, it's holding contents of a different nature. Most of it is pretty ordinary (a binder, some notebooks, that sort of thing), but there are also a few items of note: a ceramic owl, my college diploma and valedictorian medallion, a certificate bearing the legend "Outstanding Future Teacher," and a red and black library bell that no longer works. At the end of last August, I carried it into my very first classroom, and when I carried it back out on the last day of the school year, I expected it would be finding a new home at a new school in a matter of weeks.
But the school year has begun, and the box and I are sitting at home instead of in a classroom. I'm not teaching this year. No matter how many times I say that, I still feel a creeping sense of shame, like I've admitted to doing something wrong.
I almost didn't get to teach last year either. Fresh out of college, I submitted 25 applications and interviewed with six different schools in pursuit of my first teaching position. I was so desperate for a job that I even took an interview the week of my wedding. If I couldn't work full-time, I knew my new husband and I would have no fixed income and no health insurance while he finished his semester of student teaching. When we flipped our calendar to August, I still had nothing.
But at the eleventh hour, I secured a position teaching 8th grade English in a town about 40 minutes away. I signed my contract on Friday, August 24th, and on Monday, August 27th, I started in-service with just a week until the first day of school. With only 48 hours and a budget of approximately nothing to prepare my room for Open House, I went for the "depressing minimalist" classroom aesthetic. At some point in the future, I reasoned, I'd actually decorate. In the meanwhile, the posters I'd scavenged from kind coworkers and the few personal effects in the printer paper box would have to do.
By the end of my first quarter, however, two things had become clear to me, the first being that any efforts I made to beautify my space would only be undone by my students. They picked pieces off the bulletin board that had taken me hours to put up; they threw books from my classroom library around the room like Frisbees; they hid, stole, and pounded on my library bell, a device my cooperating teacher had gifted to me during student teaching to help me call attention without having to raise my voice, until it broke beyond repair. My second realization calcified following an incident when a student got physically violent with a teacher: I was not in a place I wanted to stay.
My first year of teaching can be summed up in one neat symbol, the cooked deer heart that came to my classroom as somebody's midmorning snack. The experience as a whole was horrifying in ways I could never have imagined when I decided as a fifth grader that I wanted to be a teacher. And it wasn't just first year teacher syndrome–colleagues with ten and twenty years of teaching experience confided that this was the worst year of their careers and urged me to leave.
I started filling out applications as soon as positions opened. I knew there had to be some fantastic opportunity out there for me–in a high school, I hoped, somewhere closer to home, where open hostility toward authority figures wasn't the norm. A door would open.
So I applied. I interviewed with two different schools. I prayed. I waited. And on the last day of school, I sent my letter of resignation, packed up my box, and closed the door to my classroom for the last time. I felt the way someone who has just leapt from a burning building must feel: free yet terrified. But, as I reminded myself, I had plenty of time until the school year started, plenty of time to get things sorted out for Year 2.
Yet just like the year before, I got rejected. Only this time it was worse, because I was no longer a 21-year-old college grad with nothing to bring to the table but my textbooks and my wide-eyed idealism. My hard-fought experience, my undeniable aptitude for the vocation, my glowing letters of recommendation–all were, in the end, not good enough. One by one, the emails trickled into my inbox to let me know that the positions I was applying for had been filled, and not by me. Each one was another door slammed shut, another disappointment. I began to feel that I was being locked out of my own future.
In the end, there was only one place left for me to go: back to school–not as a teacher, but as a student once again, working toward my MA in Composition online through Liberty University. Classes start next month.
As I scroll through back-to-school pictures and read education blogs about the first days of school, I wish I could be out there doing all that again, but better this time. I think about my what this year-long gap on my resume where I'm just starting my master's and working the retail job I've held since college is going to look like to a potential employer. I wonder how my students are doing, if any of them have come down to say hi and been shocked to see someone else's name on the door, someone else at my desk. Even though I don't miss my first teaching job, I do miss teaching (and my students!), and it's so easy for me to mope about all the doors that have been closed to me and what I imagine to be behind them. It's easy to feel like I'm just roaming the hallway of my life, waiting to get to the next place.
But the reality of it is that this is where I am. Even though it doesn't look the way I thought it would, it is nevertheless good, and it is shaping me and preparing me for the future in ways I am currently incapable of understanding. I have little life experience, but that which I do have has taught me that God will provide precisely what I need at exactly the right time, even if I don't particularly enjoy it and have to wait longer than I want to for it. This isn't some break from my life–this, today, is my life.
So here I am, typing away. I'm enjoying my day off from work, thinking about the new recipe I'm trying for dinner, hoping Mitchell is having a good day at school, and glancing every now and then at the box beside my desk. In this moment, we are both exactly where we're supposed to be.