(*But not really.)

Don’t worry, I’m not unemployed. I just don’t know what my employment is, any more.

What exactly is my job?

Seems like a simple question, doesn’t it? With a simple answer? I’m a teacher. I teach. I teach high school English, also known as Language Arts, with a few extra frills like AP and College Readiness (A required elective at my school intended to, well, ready students for — not really college, more college admissions. Though I do take the opportunity to teach some “life skills” like how to handle credit and resume writing and so on.). So as a high school English teacher, I help students aged 14-18 to improve their language skills: their writing, their reading, their speaking and listening.

Except it’s not that simple. It’s actually very tough to know exactly what my job is.

It’s tough to know, for sure, for a number of reasons. First and most important, because right now it is changing, and the changes are bad; I am grieving the loss of what my job used to be. 

It’s tough second because society is not clear on what role they want schools to play, and therefore what my job is. Am I a supplementary parent? Should I be teaching the wee tykes how to live in the world? Teach them responsibility, time management, punctuality, and how to distrust the Google predictive text? (Sorry, that last one was mine, not society’s — I will not be writing these on Docs any more.) Should I be teaching them morality? To be aware of and sensitive to the needs of others? To be kind, open-minded, empowered, woke? 

Or am I a functionary with a single, limited task: to prepare students for a career that will earn them a good living, while staying the hell away from their values?

It’s tough thirdly because my administration wants me to do a job that is so clearly not my actual job that I can’t abide doing what lazy-minded people throughout history have done when these kinds of conundrums confront them: just follow orders. 

Huh. Actually, you know, I could do that. It would make things so much easier. If I stopped thinking about what I should be doing, and only did what I was instructed to do. Followed the curriculum as it is prescribed, used the activities recommended by people who don’t teach and don’t care, gave students behavior recognition awards and sent them to the dean of students when they misbehaved. The students would stop having high expectations of me, and would stop giving me grief when I couldn’t be all things to all of them, all the time. 

It sounds nice. It sounds simple, and easy, to just do what they want me to do.

Except it also sounds like Hell. 

One of my classes asked last week how long I’ve been teaching, and I told them this is my 22nd year. And then they asked “How do you keep doing this? How are you still so patient with us?” And the answer is two things: one, I think I’m good at this, and that means I don’t worry too much about losing my job, or about not being able to do my job on any given day or given any particular situation; and two, I believe this job is important.

They confirmed for me that I am good at this job, which is very kind of them to say and made me feel good; but that doesn’t solve this essential conundrum, because if I asked my students what, precisely, my job is, they would give me all the same answers I have laid out here, and between which I struggle deciding upon as my fundamental task. (None of this, by the way, is made easier by the voice yelling in my head, which sometimes sounds like my wife, that my real job, my real task, is to write. It’s an important voice. Maybe I should stop silencing it just so that I can focus on teaching.) Some would say my job is to teach them English. Some would say my job is to do what the school tells me to do, whatever will earn my paycheck. Some would say my job is to help them get ready to get jobs — though if I pursued that line, and asked them how I, specifically, am to help them get ready, they would mostly say that reading helps expand your vocabulary so you don’t sound dumb, which is most often what they say when I ask them why English is a core subject, why it is important to study this language and our literature. And that ain’t it.

So here I am, good at a job I can’t define, trying to perform it while watching it essentially collapse around me.

I have to go back to something I said earlier. Because (confession time) I stopped writing this post four or five months ago, and I just came back to it this morning; I have been thinking about finishing it since I stopped writing it, but I’ve never made the time to do it until now (I don’t listen to that voice that tells me to write.). However, every time I thought about this post, I thought of it as the one about grieving the loss of my job as I’ve known it. That was the main point I wanted to make here, although I seem to have gotten off into my usual tangents about trying to figure out what the hell I actually do. That’s my usual tangent because, honestly, I really don’t know. Which is maddening. I perform my job duties as I see fit: beyond the basic requirements of showing up every day, making sure students don’t stab each other, taking attendance and posting grades and attending meetings, everything else I do is selected according to my thoughts and understanding of my job. But I am never sure, never, that I am making the right choices. I’m not even sure it matters what choices I make.

See? There I go again, off on this subject, instead of the one I think I need to write about. Grief. Suddenly it seems to me that I am avoiding it. (Pardon me, I have to go wake my wife up. And make more coffee. Eat some breakfast. I’ll come right back to this subject, I swear.) Now. Here I am. Let’s talk about this.

I got this idea from my meditation app, Headspace (Highly recommend. Many different styles of guided and unguided meditations, relaxations, sleep aids, etc. Free for teachers.), which at one point said that many of us, in this madhouse of a world, are grieving the loss of normalcy. That was the emphasized point: it is grief. We are grieving. And I realized that I am.

But also, I don’t want to be. Partly because I know my grief doesn’t compare to the grief of those who have lost someone in the last two years, and there are far too many of those people — though I also know that comparing emotions to someone else’s, and comparing situations to someone else’s, are both foolish and self-negating. Partly also because I don’t want to grieve my job. That would make the job too serious, too important. I’ve always wanted to leave teaching behind, and if I’m grieving the loss of my normal concept of teaching — doesn’t that mean I’m too attached to it? That I — ick! — love it? Was destined to do this? Isn’t that yet another indicator that, in fact, my true calling is not writing, or anything else I’ve dreamed of doing over the years (Voice acting, politics, running a bookstore-cafe, etc.), but is trying desperately to get lazy, indifferent teenagers to write a real paragraph without counting sentences?

No. It doesn’t mean that. (Also, that’s not what teaching is. I may not be sure of what my job is, but I have a very good idea of what it isn’t. That’s why I don’t simply give up and act the way my administration wants me to act. Because they’re wrong. [Also my administration has, staggeringly and unexpectedly, changed in the time between beginning this post and finishing it; but that’s a subject for another day.])

When I say I am grieving the loss of my normal concept of teaching, I mean just this: that everything has changed. I had a good grip on it. I was good at it, and I knew it. I knew how to be good at it. I knew how to actually help my students, how to give them something of what they need. I felt comfortable making choices about what my students should do, what I should do with them, in order to help them in the ways I knew they needed help. But that knowledge, that sense of comfort and expertise, was predicated on a version of teaching that suddenly vanished entirely in March of 2020. And it has not come back yet. And without it, without a class full of students, whose faces I can see, whom I can cajole and persuade and intrigue into participating in a discussion about literature — I’m lost. I don’t know what I need to do now, and I don’t know how to do it.

And that sucks. That is crippling. I lost my sense of purpose, I lost my sense of mastery and my consequent self-respect. I lost all of my confidence. I have always been puzzled by what others want me to do: but mostly because I knew exactly what I wanted to do, what I thought was important, which was frequently different from what others wanted me to do. But that was okay, because they were wrong, and I was right, and I knew it. And now I don’t know, any more. Because what was important and what I wanted to do? Those are gone.

That hurts. No, of course it doesn’t hurt as much as the loss of a loved one, as much as the loss of health, or any of the other severe, permanent, defining, devastating losses some people have suffered over the course of this damn pandemic. But it hurts, nonetheless. And it leaves me confused, and angry, and uncertain about what I do now, and how I define myself.

And that is grief.

I know that the right thing for me to do is address it. But of course, I don’t know how; I’ve never grieved for something like this before. So I’ve been ignoring it, just sort of hoping for things to go back to the way they were, for my normal to come back. And getting angry when things keep refusing to go back to the way they were. And getting more and more tired and frustrated and despondent with dealing with things that are unlike what I’ve lost, what I miss, what I wish would return for me.

But that’s just it. Things are never going to go back to the way they were. Even if some things return, other things will stay forever changed. My students will be back in the classroom — they are now — but they had over a year of working online while staying at home all day every day; and some of them loved that, and they miss it, and they resent being forced to give it up and go back into the building, back into the classroom. There’s a large section of the student population that have a whole new grievance of their own with school, now. And that changes the dynamic of the classroom. There are different ideas about priorities, and different ideas about what school should be and what it is; they have a new understanding of what’s important, and it’s different from what it used to be, which means they don’t want to do things they used to do willingly, because now they see those things as inconsequential. Things like following along with the pace of the class; looking at me when I’m talking; speaking up when they have thoughts. None of those mattered over the year we were online. And over that year, they never had to deal with the annoying kids in the class: and now they have to again, and they don’t know how.

Because they’re grieving too. Which is why I can’t just tell them to suck it up and act the way I want them to. Because that, for many of my students, is a loss, a serious and severe loss, which they resist as I have resisted this loss.

I have to deal with that: I have to adapt to the new normal.

But first, I have to accept that my old normal, the situation that felt so generally good and right to me, is gone.

And to accept it, I need to grieve its loss. The loss of the me that lived in that world. I really liked him.

Hopefully I’ll like the new me, too. We’ll just have to see.