Being a Teacher Sucks

On the horror of teaching in the contemporary world

The sun filtered benevolently through the dried fig leaves. Those now yellow, slightly aromatic hands of the eternal summer, calmly expected the slightest gust of northern wind to lead them to their winter dwellings.

Nights come slower here compared to other places I’d lived. Everything seems slower, especially me — my breath, my movement, my understanding. Even the occasional and annoying music of the neighbours during the weekends sounds like the performers were too lazy during the sessions.

Slow is good. Slow is life.

Two jays, each with a nut in their beak, are trying to find a decent station on the pear tree to drop their catch directly onto the cement tiles. Somewhere in the distance, the cattle bells ring, marking their unhurried movement towards the sheepfold. The crickets are silent already. There are no swallows around anymore. A few weeks ago, they met over the electricity wires, doing their weird late-season rituals. Ever since they’ve been replaced by the local migrants; by those creatures that traditionally run away from the heatwaves: blackbirds, thrushes, titmice, jays, robins, etc.

The time came, in other words. It’s a full-blooded autumn now, except for the droughts. Three months have passed since the last drop of rain fell over our small village. The days are still scorching, with temperatures — albeit on November’s eve — sometimes climbing as high as 32 degrees Celsius.

I have another two or three days of this silence and ease, after which I have to travel about 150 miles to fulfil my school hours. These days, I teach in a small, private elementary school. Social Sciences. The only discipline everyone is well-versed in.

The total number of my students is about thirty pupils. Compared to the 350 students I taught in the public high school two academic years ago that’s, all-in-all, one class. The pay, however, for two days, four hours each, compared to a full working week, is the same.

But let’s first go back a bit further.

I never really wanted to be anything in particular. Not even a decent human being, you know? Besides the regular “I want to become an architect,” one of those prefabricated phrases, always ready at hand, with which I answered the adults each time they tried to figure out my future, I never had much of a fixed vision. Even now. It fluctuated: good football or basketball player, a serious electronic DJ and/or producer, a respectable cook and so forth.

33 years old now, heading for the 34th in January. You can say I’m a millennial. One of those who, prior to coming into this world, lost that very same future and, more generally, their history.

Back in my high school years, I spent most of my time either making some bucks with whatever job happened to be available or behind the school, smoking weed and getting into fights.

Just after I quit basketball, in late 9th grade, I got obsessed with techno, hard techno, schranz, and hardcore. I started mixing, making my music, and reaching out to other people doing (mostly underground) raves in the area. This got me involved in all the problems that I still suffer from, but this is for another time.

It wouldn’t be a lie if I tell that my mom wasn’t happy with my grades. I graduated high school with just about 3,50 on the six-unit scale. About to repeat an entire school year because of a poor grade in psychology and logic — some of the disciplines I currently teach.

I’ve been working since my 14. However, my first official labour contract wasn’t signed before I reached 21, just about the same time I quit drugs and raves. I did low-paid work at the time. Hell, I still do. It came in all exploitative kinds and shapes: construction, tourism, leaflets and posters, restaurants, low-skill IT (call centres, internet providers, TV, all sorts of cables), supermarkets, tobacco and liquor shops, distribution, and muscle work of all sorts, either in the province (agriculture) or in the city (moving, disassembling, what have you).

Pretty sure I’m missing something in that list, but who cares? I remember most of my colleagues by face, if not by name, that’s what truly matters.

I’ve never stopped reading, though. Novels, be they classics or modern, poetry, non-fiction, magazines, or whatever I could lay my hands on. I was haunted by images and representations, charged by the cinema that I’d been pirating, cable TV that I’d been stealing, literature that I’d been renting, theatre that I’d imagined seeing… And, of course, poetry that I never understood. Those weird threads of words that were hiding in my grandparent's flat, just under their bed near all those crosswords that my grandad was obsessed with.

It took me years and years before I truly appreciated the craftsmanship behind poetry; before I acknowledged its importance.

Out of nothing, I became a child of words.

Iris Murdoch would’ve been proud.

One day, around late 2014, we had a really bad winter season at the restaurant where I’ve been working for a couple of years. Not literally we, the boss. And you know what, fuck the boss. I was quite happy having some of my working time spent on my studies, for which I’d otherwise had about one or two hours a night before dying out of exhaustion on the sofa.

At that time, I was struggling to understand some of the big shots. I was fighting with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I’ve read some of the ancients, the medieval, some Easterns, a bit of Descartes and Rousseau, the existentialist, for sure, but that was something else.

Suddenly, I felt this urge to grasp more. To understand all of it, going beyond. What was this weird, beardless guy, who died around two centuries ago, going for? What should I do to go there with him?

It was such an absurd and sudden inclination, that everyone from my surroundings, be they my friends, colleagues, or family, laughed for half a year while I was preparing for my exams at the biggest university in our country. Around that time I was already studying seriously the German Idealist, the Young Hegelians, and the Phenomenologists. The university was about 300 miles away. And they were taking into consideration my high-school grades, especially those from the humanities. So, I had to hit the highest at exams to get accepted.

And I did. Then I hit the highest from our class in the first, second, third, fourth and fifth years of our studies. I took an internship at the Academy of Sciences and got my pedagogical specialization. I even went abroad, to Central Europe, to dive deeper into Medieval and Renaissance philosophy — a specialization with a focus on Aristotle’s legacy. I was obsessed with philosophy.

During my studies, I was involved in a collective, a sort of think-tank that was producing some decent social and political analysis. I was doing union work in an autonomous organization as well. I made a few book translations. Launched an online magazine that aimed to make the humanities and academic knowledge, generally speaking, more accessible through a popular language. Some noble folks joined and helped the development of the project. I’ve edited and published, and published and edited, and took exams after exams while working full-time in the restaurant, travelling back and forth 300 miles by train almost every other week.

Since my second year in the university, I have already started working on my thesis. It was a philosophical examination of architecture, of time and space, of bodies and place(lessness). By the fifth year, I already had an original concept in mind — dynamic aesthetics. I’ll soon share some stories concerning this idea here, but to briefly explain it, I’ll say it’s mostly academic jibberish. It hit the highest as well.

Suddenly, it was all over. While finishing my thesis, about 100 and something pages, with some bucks on the side, I decided to quit my job. Just a couple of months after defending it, I stumbled upon a job offer from a local high school. They were searching for a teacher for the so-called philosophical cycle: psychology and logic (8th grade), ethics and aesthetics (9th grade), philosophy (10th grade), and civic education (11th and 12th grade). I’ve accepted the offer.

All-in-all, I’ve been teaching 350 pupils a week. Moreover, they’ve made me a class teacher to one of the eighth graders. So, on top of that, I’ve been personally responsible for 25 teenagers and their doings.

Over 95% of our kids were from working-class backgrounds. The majority of them came from slums and villages adjacent to the city. Others — from distant ones, living day-to-day in school dormitories on the pocket money their working-abroad parents managed to send. We also had quite a few refugees and a large number of students who couldn’t read or write properly in any language whatsoever.

It was by the second week of the first month that I already knew being a teacher sucks. Big time.

Being a teacher sucks. Being a Social Sciences teacher even more so. And I can give you a thousand examples of precisely why.

Where should I start, then? Probably with the payment? With the way the educational system is organized within the framework of neoliberalism? Or with the exhaustion, the burnout, the extra working hours, the sleepless nights, the lack of real unions, the lack of respect from the students, the lack of respect from the parents, the lack of respect from the colleagues, the lack of respect from the principals?

Or from the fact that, especially with humanities, everyone already reached the absolute truth back within the confines of the family unit?

Whatever I have to say is more or less irrelevant. Even worse, it’s a nail in the coffin of the true authority, usually the dominant parental figure. Those same figures brought me to the principal almost every week. I’ve been there more often than the biggest troublemakers of our students.

Parents called because I was sceptical of the official national holidays. Of the national flag that somehow appeared in each room a month after the war in Ukraine started. Of the notion of the nation more generally. Of the political spectacle in all its garments. Of the triple parliamentary elections that happened during a single academic year. Of the notion of the family even.

I’ve been called to the principal because I’ve asked the kids to join a protest against the violence against women. А violence that took the lives of over 60 women at the hands of their boyfriends, husbands, and fathers, within a calendar year in a small country like ours. Because I said that misogyny is wrong and women’s place isn’t in the kitchen. I’ve been called because I said that gay love is love and that the LGBTQ+ cause deserves to be supported by the whole of our society.

I’ve been called there because I said that Roma people aren’t a subhuman group, even though we had Roma kids in school. I’ve been called because I said that there are no subhumans, that even the animals aren’t below us. I’ve been called because I don’t eat meat, don’t sit at the desk but on the floor, and don’t like rich people. Because I quote Choran and his assertion that anyone who’s not dying of starvation today should be regarded with suspicion. Because I hold that there’s no human nature. Because I hold that religion lost its heuristic power aeons ago.

I’ve been called into the boss’s office because I teach about unions, workers' solidarity and the history of exploitation in classes I had to teach that the highest level of human society has been already reached and that it holds the economic face of capitalism and the political face of representative democracy. Because we had discussions over The Matrix, Squid Game, Snowpiercer, and so forth.

I’ve been called because I said that every big city in the world should have a monument in honour of the unrealized paedophile.

I’ve been called because I said that we shouldn’t rat out shoplifters.

In short, I’ve been called there, because I was criticising and trying to historicise what was otherwise taken for granted while teaching them how to do the same.

Being a teacher sucks the most, however, because, two years after I quit, most of my brightest pupils don’t remember anything that we’ve studied. And when I say this, I mean — at all. Their Facebook and Instagram profiles are filled with posts and stories of conspiracy theories, misogyny, homophobia, COVID-19, as well as climate change denialism, etc.

As we’ve never really spoken about these things. As if I talked to myself through them even during our most inspiring and intellectually charged discussions.

Me, the ventriloquist.

Being a teacher in a private school sucks as well. It seems to me, however, that in the case of the public one, the benefits were to the students, at the expense of my being penniless and overworked. Here, on the contrary, the money gets up, the fatigue is not such a factor, but the truth is that I have nothing to give them.

They come from wealthy families, predominantly business owners — the entrepreneurs that our world depends on. I want to say exploiters, but I’m tired of seeing the principal.

In other words, today I teach the people who tomorrow will be the bosses of my prior students.

And that sucks. What could I teach them? To be better people? To recognize injustice? To show them the history of capitalism and why what their parents are doing, although justified in terms of their welfare, is morally wrong and reproduces the suffering and adversity we see all around us?

It doesn’t really matter what I say, to be honest.

In the end, it’s their economic situation that will and already is shaping them. Not me.

At last, it rained. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to forage some wild mushrooms before the week is over and the time for my new school commitments arrive.

The thirsty sighs of the garden and the surrounding land seem to find their consolation.

I wish I too had been promised something.