Being a teacher for the past two years was a lot of things: challenging, rewarding, frustrating, tiring. Most of all, though, it was an identity shift for me. Teaching quickly became my main source of small talk. Everyone has an opinion on it: how hard it must be, how crazy the kids probably are, how tough it must be to teach with AI now. It’s an immediate source of connection and identification. People want to talk about it. I wanted to talk about it. I thought it was endlessly interesting and I was proud of it.
What’s harder to describe—because it was less concrete and because it’s a little embarrassing—is the way that I internalized all this external dialogue about teachers. I’ve been thinking about it like this: I had to sacrifice a lot in order to teach 7th grade English, especially at the kind of school where I was teaching. It required tons of time. It took basically all my energy. It required that I sacrifice, too, a certain self-conception of myself as someone who only does intellectual or white-collar work—not because I don’t think teaching is intellectual or white collar, but because most people around me clearly did not. So, all of a sudden, I was giving all of myself to a job that people around me interpreted, at best, as a kind of well-intentioned martyrdom and, at worst, as a kind of glorified babysitting.
Because teaching required so much hard work and sacrifice, I needed it to mean more than just a job. It needed to be the most important thing I could be doing with my time. I bought into the supercommon way of envisioning any underpaid pro-social job: You’re not just getting paid in money but in validation and societal importance. That meant that I quickly made teaching a big part of my identity. I already saw myself as hard-working, nurturing, anti-corporate, so it wasn’t a jump to convince myself that teaching wasn’t just what I did but who I was.
The problem with this line of thinking, for me at least, was that it led to me putting an insane amount of pressure on myself as an educator. Keep in mind, I was only in my first two years of teaching. I was not a pro by any stretch of the imagination. Still, even knowing that, by my second year, I was fundamentally incapable of extending myself any grace. If I felt like I’d been unfair to a kid or slighted them somehow, it kept me up all night; if a kid tried to talk to me during my lunch break, and I sent them back down to the lunchroom, I felt guilty. And even though I fundamentally disagreed with my school’s emphasis on standardized testing, I craved validation in the form of my kids’ outcomes as measured by the state test, and I freaked out if the data weren’t as good as other teachers’. If this job was the most important thing about me, then it was a travesty if I did it less than perfectly.
I had to sacrifice a lot in order to teach 7th grade English, especially at the kind of school where I was teaching
My self-worth was so tied to teaching that I was neglecting other parts of myself that I loved. I ignored my writing; I read less. Although I tried to be really intentional about socializing, invariably my social life took a hit. The real breaking point, though, came during last year’s winter break. I had been off work for about five days, and my “vacation brain,” as my husband and I called it, was kicking in. I was energetic. I was feeling creative. I was talking to my husband about something, and he said, apropos of nothing, “Wow, I miss you. I miss this version of you.”
It’s hard to describe how much that single line affected me. My husband had never, ever been anything less than fully supportive of me teaching. He loved that I loved it. He never complained about how tired I was every night, how snappy I could be. He never asked me if I thought I was making the right decision. And this wasn’t him complaining, either—it felt more like an observation. It hurt. That was the feeling I kept coming back to in the spring, when I was deciding whether I’d go back to my school for another year: that I didn’t want the people in my life to miss me for another year. I didn’t want to miss myself, obviously, either, but I was too distracted to really miss any previous version of me.
I’m early in my education career, but I know, for all my anxieties and shortcomings, that I was—am—a good teacher. I care deeply. I’m smart and I work hard. And yet somehow, for me, that still wasn’t enough. I still struggled to frame my time in the classroom as a learning experience instead of as a failure.
A co-worker of mine—a veteran teacher—told me in my first month of teaching to remember that teaching is just a job. I found this message a little dispiriting at the time, but now I see that she was trying to help me. I wish I could have heard in her message: It’s OK if you’ve always loved school and suddenly you dread entering a school building; it’s OK if you have days where your students make you want to cry. It’s also OK if you’re not the miracle worker you secretly thought you would be or if your classroom is less “Dead Poets Society” and more “The Hunger Games.” It has to be OK because teaching is hard, and you’re trying your best.
Negative stereotypes of educators abound: the martyr, the failure, the power-hungry tyrant. I heard echoes of these categories in the comments of well-meaning people and I cast myself accordingly. But no one told me I needed to be perfect, or even great, at teaching—I put that pressure on myself. So I know that before I return to the classroom—and I will, although not this year—I need to actively untangle some of those narratives that I’ve been projecting onto myself. I need to think through how much of my self-imposed pressure can be assuaged by sturdier boundaries and a clearer sense of myself outside of work. And for now, this identity reconstruction is something I need to do for and by myself—with some distance from the classroom.
