I Can't Bring Myself To Re-Enlist

"You know how some kids act out a lot after a parent is killed?" said a good friend, former colleague and still practicing teacher to me last night on the phone.

"Mmmmhmmm," I said, images of kids flashing through my head. I'd had a fair number of students with at least one dead parent - and most of those deaths had not been caused by diseases, either. Kids - at least the kids I'd taught - tended to become wild after such a thing, or incredibly quiet and hard-shelled. My friend continued to tell me about her extremely disturbed student, who had transferred in from the inner city district where we both used to teach.

As she continued with the girl's story, I began to feel somewhat ill. With guilt.

When I hear about kids from my old district, and especially when I (very rarely) hear about kids that I taught, I instantly feel like a soldier that has gone AWOL. The euphoria over having escaped is mixed in with massive amounts of guilt.

The last year that I taught - while I was pregnant with Lovebug - I had a seriously crazy parent who may have wanted to beat the crap out of me. Or something else. The threats were unclear. Not that it was my first threat, but he was the only one who continually hung around the school and tried to get into my classroom. The school I taught at for the first three years of my career was in a neighborhood where nobody I knew would even drive into. I had a few scarily violent (and yes, that is possible when you're dealing with mentally ill 7 year olds) over the years, too.

My supervisors tended to be idiots - people too dumb or cynical (or both) to get jobs anywhere else. I had one in particular who couldn't pronounce words like "specific" and "individual". And another - the one who really drove me out of teaching - later fired for embezzling funds. The pay was laughable - I never made more that $34,000 a year from teaching in that district. And all the promised perks were being slowly eroded.

And then there were my students. Students with dead parents. Students who had been (or, unfortunately were still being) abused. Students repeatedly hospitalized with sickle cell problems. Students who couldn't get a good night's sleep because of gunfire. Students born in prisons. Students with various untreated mental problems. Students who didn't know what the sky was called. Students who didn't know any English. Students who were autistic but got very little support.

So yeah, it felt like fighting in a losing war. A noble cause, to be sure. And there were some victories, for this or that student. But for every victory there was a failure. Or two.

I'm not saying what I did even comes close to what soldiers do every day. But I sure relate.

Sometimes I tell myself that I put in my time and it's okay to never go back to teaching in an urban district. Actually, I don't want to go back to teaching at all. Not that I really know what I'd like to do instead, of course.

But then I hear a story about my old district and the guilt washes over me.

Anybody got any advice?