Hit and miss: the trials and tribulations of teaching without a net / vol. 1

I was mistaken. After poring over the course catalog of my college and then graduate school, I became convinced that the expertise of English literature would be mine after six years of higher education. My goal: To be a high school English teacher. I didn’t spend much time questioning what being a teacher would look like, or be like. I had my own visceral reactions to high school teachers to ensure me that my own performance would be something superior. Just as my gut knew how to react to another teacher’s lesson, as a teacher, my gut would guide me toward the most fantastic lessons, and therefore toward the elusive “Eureka!” moments I craved as a student.

In theory, student teaching would have been an opportunity to debunk this pie-in-the-sky image of my teaching career. However, my cooperating teacher begrudgingly accepted a student teacher, and I spent a semester emulating her teaching persona. This amounted to presenting a dramatic retelling of the Greek myths students read in their Edith Hamilton books each night. Assessments? Multiple-choice vocabulary quizzes. Instead of testing my theories with my own teaching practice, I padded them by emulating another practice that I once again judged with harsh cynicism.

With lots of creative vision and no practical experience, I was doomed. I know this now. But when I began my job search, I was undaunted, and I assumed I could teach in any school, in any classroom. I could just close the door and work the magic I knew was latent within me…OK, I was a little daunted, especially when private school head-hunting firms encouraged me to be open to teaching anywhere, given my lack of experience. And I was too afraid to navigate the bureaucratic, idiosyncratic hiring practices of one public school district after another. When I got an offer from the small progressive private school with the principal who assured me “I could teach anything I wanted” and “hone my craft and art as a teacher,” I was sold.

There’s a backdrop to this narrative, of course, one I neglected to notice at the time. I was so fixated on the promise of finally being a teacher, and having my very own classroom (etc. etc.), that the increasingly jagged line that was my personal life fell by the wayside. In the car, being driven by the head of the math department from the airport to my hotel, I paid attention to the suburban streets of this Midwestern city. “Can I live here?” I asked myself. Everything was familiar: Shell stations, Walmarts, Olive Gardens, Barnes and Noble. Good, so I can eat, shop, and get gas here. Can I live here? In between the new strip malls with their newly-landscaped beds of bright orange mulch and deep shiny green, sprawling two-story apartment complexes promised pools, laundry, tennis, and work out facilities. Here was a lifestyle in a can. Why couldn’t I live here? The place was already every place I had ever lived (save the depressed old industrial town where I had gone to graduate school—this had to be better than that, right?)