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Abstract

most everything I could to break free. But now there’s a part of me that’s starting to buy in. There’s a part of me that is starting to feel like I could move onto a job that’s higher paying, that is more prestigious, that does challenge me a bit more.I try to apply that ambition to my current job and profession. There’s the devotion I give to every student and parent that I work with. I work after hours to meet the needs of every student I feel like needs more support. I fill out hours of paperwork to build those cases. I communicate often with parents to keep them updated on student progress.It’s a ton of work, but it’s more tedious than it is difficult. If you implement good systems of management where everyone is accountable and there’s a good line of communication, then the school will do better to meet the needs of its special education population and all students with disabilities.The challenge in my capacity is how to support emotionally and in incredibly urgent situations. It’s the fact that everything is so emotionally draining, all the time.I had a situation last year where a student who was in foster care was suddenly homeless and not in foster care anymore. I spent three hours with the student on the phone with different hotlines for different agencies, including Child Protective Services, trying to see if there was anyone else who could get her a place to stay. At the time, our social worker was unavailable, and other people who specialized more in these issues were unavailable. I exhausted every resource of friends I had in my line of work to beg them for advice and what to do.It didn’t get resolved on that day, but it did get resolved within the week for the student to find a placement.But these are the situations I run into constantly. Trying to help a student who suddenly found herself homeless was not my job. But how could I not try to help when the student did not even know where they did not know where they were going to stay that night? How could I not try to leverage every relationship I had of people who could help the kid in a situation that literally felt like life or death?There are other times where my actions show I’m still a better person than my ambition necessarily dictates. I spend tens of minutes if not hours on the phone with individual parents trying to find a solution to their problems. If I promise I’ll do something, like administer a test or talk to a teacher, I’ll do it because it’s personally super important for me to stand by my word. For example, I observed a student, pushed for a supervisor’s observation, filled out three hours of paperwork, and helped collect six weeks of data to help the social worker with an assessment on the student’s behavior.To me, it feels like every one of these situations is a crisis and incredibly urgent. And I wonder whether I’m gaslighting myself by convincing myself that everything is urgent, but that’s how it genuinely feels when you have a super upset parent (for legitimate reasons) begging you to do something to help their child. It would feel unethical to do absolutely nothing.The school system is a huge entity where tons of people service a student and contribute to a student’s education before they get to high school. It felt like I was trying to single-handedly remedy every (in my view) mistake that was previously done to the disservice of the student in elementary and middle school, because she needed help and I felt like it was the right thing to do. A rational person would say “if the student didn’t have a 1-on-1 before high school, why would she suddenly need it now?” But clearly I was hellbent on trying to do what I thought was best and right and not being a rational person about it.So you can see I’m not the best in necessarily setting boundaries with those parents or students. But I do it anyway because I feel like it’s the right thing to do, and because it feels so important.When I was a special education teacher, I loved my students and similarly went above and beyond but often felt like there were several students with significantly m

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ore intensive needs than I could provide. There were students with such significant behavioral challenges that I felt like I was just a bad teacher if I had struggles managing their behavior. If I didn’t intervene and immediately seek support from administrators at times, there could have been multiple altercations. There were some kids who would sometimes see decreases in their test scores at periodic assessments, and I would think I was a failure if they didn’t see a huge increase.Now, in my current capacity as the IEP chair, I see often that no teacher is a superhero. If one teacher has concerns about a student’s behavior, much more often than not, every teacher’s progress report will say the same exact thing. It’s very rarely the case that one teacher is just horrible at classroom management and the rest are just better (that was how it felt for me at times during my first year of teaching).If a student is walking the halls and not attending any of their classes, there usually is not that one teacher or that one class where a teacher is able to reach them and singlehandedly save their whole education. And in test scores, I now see variability all the time where kids’ scores get better and worse. Maybe kids have bad days, got bad sleep on a given day, and maybe there are some test administration days that go better than others.That isn’t to say that one teacher or trusted adult can’t make a difference, because there are plenty of exceptions. But it is to say the problem is a lot more systemic and a lot more intensive than “Mr. so and so is a horrible teacher” And it’s impossible to just slap on every service in the world in one meeting, but sometimes a kid’s services are inadequate. And sometimes the problem is a lot bigger than just school and the student needs so much support that the school can’t fix it.All of this is to say there’s a lot of me that still cares deeply and is willing to go above and beyond for my students. There’s a huge part of me that will drop everything for these urgent situations. And because that part of me is willing to give so much, sometimes I get exhausted. Sometimes I joke to friends something like “my job is too stressful — I really need to do something where not everything is a crisis and emergency.”And that compassion fatigue and exhaustion leads me to think in a worse way, to think in terms of what people tell me. They’re the dark thoughts I don’t want to have, including “why don’t I move onto a job that pays more money” or “why don’t I immediately jump ship to a more prestigious job once I get my law degree?”So I love the part of myself that is still willing to love, give, and do everything in my capacity to help. But I hate this growing ambition, this borderline arrogance, this sense that despite how important my job is, it’s not compensated well enough or respected enough.Again, a lot of these issues are systemic — teachers and educators don’t get respected or compensated enough in America in general. I feel like I am at war with my worst enemy — myself. I have a part of myself telling me I’m wasting my talents, my time, and that it would be in my self-interest to do something else with my life. I have a part of myself that is more innate, more internally driven that just moves me to make these huge sacrifices and devote all this time and effort to my students that I care about.I don’t know which side is going to win out at the end of the day. There’s a huge part of me that thinks “there is no way I’m going to go into a ton of debt and get a law degree to make less money than I do now.” It makes me feel like a bad person to think that way, but a lot of people would in the same time.I don’t know which way the future is going to go, but I suspect, like most of us, I will always, always, be ambivalent. At the end of the day, it’s very difficult to be 100% happy or 100% dissatisfied and just have mixed and conflicted, very nuanced and strong feelings. There is a cognitive dissonance in simultaneously prioritizing you career and ambition while also being altruistic, but I’m still trying to find my way.</article></body>

Loving And Hating The Person I’m Becoming

On the deeply ambivalent emotions of aiming higher than education

Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash

A couple of years ago, I could have told you I did my absolute best to be a good Christian person who put relationships first, and everything else second. I tried my very best to be someone who could love my friends, love my partner, and love my family. I put that same mindset towards my job and professional relationships. It wasn’t simple — there were tons of times I could have done better and messed up. But my relationships were the most important thing to me at the time as I sought to be better at loving God and loving others.

Now, I wouldn’t say that my goal has changed, but it has become a lot more complicated. I regret to say that I’ve grown a lot more, well, ambitious. I say ambition like it’s a dirty word when a lot of people consider it a plus. But I consider it a dirty word — not for other people, but my ideal standards for how I want to live my life and how I want to be around people around me.

Right now, professionally, I am an IEP chair, which means I’m the chair of the special education department of my school. I work in a school district and school where the vast majority of students live in poverty. I tell people I’m a special education teacher when they ask because it’s a bit difficult to explain, and I do assist students with their assignments, service them in their IEP goals in occasional pullout services, and conduct all informal and educational assessments for students.

But I am not in the classroom anymore and my primary capacity is to hold IEP meetings and ensure compliance with federal and state laws and regulations relating to special education. I have many daily interactions and obligations with students, but I am not their main academic service provider.

I am also in law school at night with the goal of (tentatively) becoming a special education lawyer. But here, I’ll focus mostly on that ambition that has caused me significant existential angst in terms of my job.

I am taking on a lot, and it’s all with the purpose of doing better and getting ahead, and trying to be the very best at everything I do.

And I have to admit there’s a part of me that loves it. There’s a part of me that loves being in the mix, loves keeping myself busy, and loves to aim high and overachieve where I thought I would be before if I had aimed even a bit lower.

But there’s also a part of me that hates this ambitious part of myself. Very often, I hear colleagues at work telling me I’m too sharp to be doing what I’m doing.

With all my talents, high test scores, and diligence, why didn’t I decide to go to medical school when I could? Why don’t I move onto something better and more prestigious? It’s good that I’m in law school to move onto something better and higher-paying — why am I wasting my potential becoming a teacher?

My colleagues who look out for me and care about me don’t exactly say it in these terms (sometimes they’re harsher), but that is the implication. I’m considered young, sharp, and with my whole future ahead of me as a 26-year-old who has devoted my whole life after college to education.

First of all, that indicates a systemic failure with how we as a society view the ever-important profession of teaching. It should be prestigious — having such a huge role in people’s futures and our country’s future should absolutely be prestigious. It shouldn’t be considered a waste of talent or potential.

That’s the kind of thing my Asian family used to say to me when they didn’t approve of my career choice, when I was pressured and almost forced to become a doctor.

I hated that voice and that pressure and did almost everything I could to break free. But now there’s a part of me that’s starting to buy in. There’s a part of me that is starting to feel like I could move onto a job that’s higher paying, that is more prestigious, that does challenge me a bit more.

I try to apply that ambition to my current job and profession. There’s the devotion I give to every student and parent that I work with. I work after hours to meet the needs of every student I feel like needs more support. I fill out hours of paperwork to build those cases. I communicate often with parents to keep them updated on student progress.

It’s a ton of work, but it’s more tedious than it is difficult. If you implement good systems of management where everyone is accountable and there’s a good line of communication, then the school will do better to meet the needs of its special education population and all students with disabilities.

The challenge in my capacity is how to support emotionally and in incredibly urgent situations. It’s the fact that everything is so emotionally draining, all the time.

I had a situation last year where a student who was in foster care was suddenly homeless and not in foster care anymore. I spent three hours with the student on the phone with different hotlines for different agencies, including Child Protective Services, trying to see if there was anyone else who could get her a place to stay. At the time, our social worker was unavailable, and other people who specialized more in these issues were unavailable. I exhausted every resource of friends I had in my line of work to beg them for advice and what to do.

It didn’t get resolved on that day, but it did get resolved within the week for the student to find a placement.

But these are the situations I run into constantly. Trying to help a student who suddenly found herself homeless was not my job. But how could I not try to help when the student did not even know where they did not know where they were going to stay that night? How could I not try to leverage every relationship I had of people who could help the kid in a situation that literally felt like life or death?

There are other times where my actions show I’m still a better person than my ambition necessarily dictates. I spend tens of minutes if not hours on the phone with individual parents trying to find a solution to their problems. If I promise I’ll do something, like administer a test or talk to a teacher, I’ll do it because it’s personally super important for me to stand by my word. For example, I observed a student, pushed for a supervisor’s observation, filled out three hours of paperwork, and helped collect six weeks of data to help the social worker with an assessment on the student’s behavior.

To me, it feels like every one of these situations is a crisis and incredibly urgent. And I wonder whether I’m gaslighting myself by convincing myself that everything is urgent, but that’s how it genuinely feels when you have a super upset parent (for legitimate reasons) begging you to do something to help their child. It would feel unethical to do absolutely nothing.

The school system is a huge entity where tons of people service a student and contribute to a student’s education before they get to high school. It felt like I was trying to single-handedly remedy every (in my view) mistake that was previously done to the disservice of the student in elementary and middle school, because she needed help and I felt like it was the right thing to do. A rational person would say “if the student didn’t have a 1-on-1 before high school, why would she suddenly need it now?” But clearly I was hellbent on trying to do what I thought was best and right and not being a rational person about it.

So you can see I’m not the best in necessarily setting boundaries with those parents or students. But I do it anyway because I feel like it’s the right thing to do, and because it feels so important.

When I was a special education teacher, I loved my students and similarly went above and beyond but often felt like there were several students with significantly more intensive needs than I could provide. There were students with such significant behavioral challenges that I felt like I was just a bad teacher if I had struggles managing their behavior. If I didn’t intervene and immediately seek support from administrators at times, there could have been multiple altercations. There were some kids who would sometimes see decreases in their test scores at periodic assessments, and I would think I was a failure if they didn’t see a huge increase.

Now, in my current capacity as the IEP chair, I see often that no teacher is a superhero. If one teacher has concerns about a student’s behavior, much more often than not, every teacher’s progress report will say the same exact thing. It’s very rarely the case that one teacher is just horrible at classroom management and the rest are just better (that was how it felt for me at times during my first year of teaching).

If a student is walking the halls and not attending any of their classes, there usually is not that one teacher or that one class where a teacher is able to reach them and singlehandedly save their whole education. And in test scores, I now see variability all the time where kids’ scores get better and worse. Maybe kids have bad days, got bad sleep on a given day, and maybe there are some test administration days that go better than others.

That isn’t to say that one teacher or trusted adult can’t make a difference, because there are plenty of exceptions. But it is to say the problem is a lot more systemic and a lot more intensive than “Mr. so and so is a horrible teacher” And it’s impossible to just slap on every service in the world in one meeting, but sometimes a kid’s services are inadequate. And sometimes the problem is a lot bigger than just school and the student needs so much support that the school can’t fix it.

All of this is to say there’s a lot of me that still cares deeply and is willing to go above and beyond for my students. There’s a huge part of me that will drop everything for these urgent situations. And because that part of me is willing to give so much, sometimes I get exhausted. Sometimes I joke to friends something like “my job is too stressful — I really need to do something where not everything is a crisis and emergency.”

And that compassion fatigue and exhaustion leads me to think in a worse way, to think in terms of what people tell me. They’re the dark thoughts I don’t want to have, including “why don’t I move onto a job that pays more money” or “why don’t I immediately jump ship to a more prestigious job once I get my law degree?”

So I love the part of myself that is still willing to love, give, and do everything in my capacity to help. But I hate this growing ambition, this borderline arrogance, this sense that despite how important my job is, it’s not compensated well enough or respected enough.

Again, a lot of these issues are systemic — teachers and educators don’t get respected or compensated enough in America in general. I feel like I am at war with my worst enemy — myself. I have a part of myself telling me I’m wasting my talents, my time, and that it would be in my self-interest to do something else with my life. I have a part of myself that is more innate, more internally driven that just moves me to make these huge sacrifices and devote all this time and effort to my students that I care about.

I don’t know which side is going to win out at the end of the day. There’s a huge part of me that thinks “there is no way I’m going to go into a ton of debt and get a law degree to make less money than I do now.” It makes me feel like a bad person to think that way, but a lot of people would in the same time.

I don’t know which way the future is going to go, but I suspect, like most of us, I will always, always, be ambivalent. At the end of the day, it’s very difficult to be 100% happy or 100% dissatisfied and just have mixed and conflicted, very nuanced and strong feelings. There is a cognitive dissonance in simultaneously prioritizing you career and ambition while also being altruistic, but I’m still trying to find my way.