Being a teacher

I’m Not Returning to School This Year for the First Time in a Long Time

It’s telling that I only just realised this now.

It’s early August and typically over the last two decades, right about now is when I’d be wrapping my brain around going back to school.

But not this year.

It was an article by John Egelkrout the other day that shook me out of my summer reverie . In it, he describes how he feels about the fact that this is the last time that his summer vacation will end. After this school year, summer will just be summer, because it is the last year of his 36 year career. He is to be congratulated — it is a huge accomplishment.

I’ve been a teacher half as long as John and this is the first August / September in about 18 years that I won’t be ending my summer vacation to head back to my classroom.

Typically, at international schools, such as the ones I’ve been working at the last seven years, the first week on campus (if you are not a newly arriving teacher requiring orientation) is spent in what’s called Professional Development, usually led by some combination of Administrators, Senior Leadership Team and the Middle Managers known as Department Heads. Some are real leaders, some have leadership thrust upon them.

The amount of poster paper, sticky notes and Sharpies a school goes through in this first week would boggle your mind.

The purpose of the process is to lay the foundation for the institution’s goals for the coming school year. There is a lot of listening to other people talk. Teachers, meanwhile, are anxious to get into their classrooms to set up, many have heard various versions of the spiel before and the most cynical know when to prick up their ears for the particular phrase or two that will be repeated throughout the year, offer a bit of sage advice, and then go back to whatever else they were doing. Many will be wondering what Friday afternoons look like around here.

This morning, I got the following text message from a friend / former colleague who is now teaching in Thailand.

“Evidence based individualised intensive level interventions are developed / selected based upon the results of validated progress monitoring / diagnostic assessment methods OR are more intensive (time, frequency, grouping, skill specific) than targeted interventions.”

If, after reading that passage, your immediate reaction is “fucking shoot me”, you wouldn’t be alone. This stuff basically writes itself.

It wouldn’t be too hard for me to go on and on about all the things like this that I won’t miss, but that article seems to have been written many times already.

Being a teacher has its rewards, you may be surprised to learn. I’ve been lucky to be in schools that have made it relatively easy to be good at it, to be a contributing member to a community that’s bigger than me and to be valued for it. I haven’t had too many problems with parents or kids and I’ve generally been left alone to do what I do in my classroom and I’m grateful for it.

Not every teacher has this experience. It’s a very difficult, demanding and soul destroying job on a lot of levels and that is part of why fewer people want to do it anymore.

For me, it’s been a natural progression of little decisions that kept me moving, kept me feeling fresh in the job and eventually these small choices all agglomerated together to bring me to year 18 and the end of my desire to do it anymore.

And it’s funny how the closing of one door — the same door you had been passing through for years — opens up many other doors that you didn’t even know existed.

I graduated from the Bachelor of Education programme at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver Canada in 2003. I then worked as a Substitute Teacher for two years in Vancouver. That was great, because you arrive in the morning when school starts and leave when it’s over, mid afternoon. There is no marking, no meetings, no planning, no extra curricular requirements. But you never really felt like an actual teacher, even though most of the time the kids were nice enough to me. There also never seemed to be a full time job on the horizon, which led me away from public education and into private instead, where I spent the rest of my career.

In 2005, I got my first full time job at a private school for Jewish kids in Vancouver. I taught seven different courses, which I happily took because someone actually gave me a job and I don’t know any better. Most teachers would tell you that that is an insane course load. A year was enough of that.

The following year, I began the first of nine at a private school on the west side of Vancouver. A great place to become an actual teacher. And I was the coach of four straight Provincial High School Swimming Championships.

From there it was three years at a school in Manizales, Colombia that called itself “international”, but was so in name only. In reality, it was a private school for the sons and daughters of the wealthy movers and shakers in a ten kilometre radius. But I got to live in Colombia, which was great.

Next, it was three years in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and this was / is a true international school in a pretty vibrant part of the world. It was an eye opening experience — especially the last half of my time there, dealing with Covid — and there isn’t much that would prepare you for living on the edge of the Indian Ocean on the East Coast of Africa.

Now I am in Kingston, Jamaica. I worked last year, part time at the American International School here, which is a good place. I was fortunate to receive a number of opportunities from them for this year and after considering them, decided against it.

I don’t mind. I’d be a fool to say that I’ll never go back to it. You never know. And teaching yoga, which I can now do, is still teaching.

But for now, I don’t mind the fact that my summer vacation hasn’t ended. I remember the feeling — a combination of anticipation and dread that would build into a knot in your gut over August, as D-Day approached. There are a lot of things that I do miss about teaching, but that’s not one of them.

I do wish everyone in the teaching brother and sisterhood the best this year and I hope you find the year fulfilling, challenging, enriching and meaningful — all the way skating through your days, above the fray.

Instead of going back to my classroom, I’ll just keep enjoying the summer.

I really do hope that you like what you have just read. If you want unlimited access to thousands of writers, consider a subscription to Medium. It will set you back $5 a month and if you use this link, then I get a slice of that and will not let it go anywhere near the teacher’s pension fund.