Well, I'm not dead, technically

As I’m sitting here, not being a teacher anymore, I’m thinking about my 12th grade Gov Teacher, Mr. Stipple. “Live intentionally. I don’t give a DAMN what you do with your life, but do it with intention.” He would walk around the room with a meter stick and slam it on empty desks for dramatic effect. And I guess something took root, because here I am, not doing something intentionally so that I will not be dead, at least technically.

That is to imply that I am in fact in some way dead, and I think that’s true. Not to be overly morbid or too early 00’s emo on you, but I could write former self a eulogy.

Here lies Luke the optimist, the silly, the Luke light-hearted,

in whose place we witness ghostly echoes of that former self

an anxious shell, gaslit into oblivion.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but it reflects the experience of teachers everywhere who have been navigating the pandemic to varied degrees of success. According to a survey by the NEA (National Education Association) 55% of teachers were thinking of leaving something else before they expected, citing stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and general feelings of burnout as their primary sources of workplace concern.

So why are teachers feeling burned out? Why is COVID causing us so much stress? Well, if you start to add up the traditional reasons teachers leave the profession (lack of pay compared to education, lack of resources, lack of respect), things really start to escalate fast. You have a whole lot of people being told “We value our educators” and “Heroes work here” that are simultaneously being told to fund their own classrooms, be a social worker, a mental health advocate, a nurse and a surrogate parent without any resources to do so, without the pay to match the work. The leads to a lot of people feeling not dead technically, but also pretty darn dead. I felt myself slipping into a world of frozen taquitos and insomnia, receding from my hobbies, my friends and from the person I was before I started teaching.

That being said, I’m not technically dead. Classroom teaching may be in the grave for me, but I learned a lot from it. Like, I can recognize and survive emotional manipulation! Or, in more positive terms, I am resilient. I can survive the depths of my mind and torrents of stress.

I intend this blog to be a place where I discuss how I rise from the ashes and build something new for myself as a post-teacher.