Last week, I had no words; it was the end of the school year: when I have to grade everything, when I am not sleeping, when I am frustrated with my students every damn day, when I have to say goodbye to people I like and appreciate, either for the summer or forever. So I posted pictures instead.

The week before that, I was sad; so I wrote about being sad — and I got some…reactions. I’m glad that my writing reached people, and affected people, so that is overall a good thing; and talking about being sad led to more conversations about sadness, which is also a good thing. But it was hard to write that post, and hard to have the conversations afterwards; this shows why it’s important to talk about emotions, particularly negative emotions, so those conversations can get easier for all of us — but I didn’t (and don’t) want to write about all of that again, which was also why I didn’t post last week. The end of the school year is depressing, and that’s not what I wanted to write about.

But now? Now it’s summertime. At last. I have been work-free for two days (Almost. I had one student write to ask why they had not gotten a grade on a paper they claimed to have turned in, and one student whom I have been asking to turn things in so I can give them a passing grade. But both of those are minor tasks, both resolved in a matter of minutes — and both finished, now.), and so I have read my book, and I have walked my dogs, and I have played Minecraft. I have napped. It has been lovely.

So now I feel like I can find some time to put together some words that aren’t just a cri de coeur, or packaged a thousand at a time into a picture. Some of those words are definitely going to go into my book: because by God I am going to finish my third pirate novel, and wrap up the Damnation Kane series — the first series I will complete in my writing career. But some of the words can come here, I think.

So. What shall I write about?

Part of me wants to write about how much nicer it is to be relaxed and happy than to be stressed and sad; but that’s really pretty stupid. Because of course it is nicer. Nobody needs to hear that from me. And some people would probably be bothered hearing that from me, because they might have to think about how they are not relaxed and happy, and then they might feel bad for not being relaxed and happy. Also, I’m not simply nor entirely relaxed and happy. So we won’t be talking about that.

Part of me thinks I should review the political book that I read, which I said I would be reviewing; but I’m not sure that’s important. I have noticed, in looking at the stats for this blog, that my old book reviews and essays are by far the most popular posts over time; that some of my personal weekly essays get a lot of views, but the book reviews (like this one) and essays about books (like this one) are the ones that people keep coming back for, month after month; but those are about popular books, not political books — and not political books that are almost two decades out of date, which didn’t change the power of the book’s message, but did leave me wishing it was more current. Which probably means that fewer people will want to read this particular book with each passing year. So I don’t know how many people want to read my thoughts on that book; and I don’t think I could have fun with the review, as I did with the two linked above. So I think I will probably let it go, and maybe write a review of the next book I’m going to read — Slaughterhouse Five, which I am re-reading for the first time in a decade or two, as part of a book swap with my former student, the one who got me to re-read and actually appreciate John Knowles’s A Separate Peace.

But that’s later. For now, right now, what have I got to write about?

I’ve got it. Let’s review this past school year.

Now, I haven’t moved far enough past this school year to be able to judge it fairly and logically; also, I don’t think it a good idea to take an entire segment of either life or education and boil it down to a simple rating out of five. (Because grades are garbage…) I just want to give some of my thoughts and impressions of this past year.

First of all, some of the good things: my wife came back to work at my school again this year. That is one of the best things that could ever happen, because my wife is my favorite person in the world; every time I get to see her at work, it makes my day better. This year I got to ride in to work with her every single day. I got to walk her to her classroom. I got to help her with tasks at school. When she left (Early in the day, because she only worked part time, exactly as she wanted to), she would usually stop by my classroom to say goodbye; it made my morning better, every single time. It’s also good because my wife is an excellent teacher, and I’m happy for the students who got to take her classes; even though not all of them appreciated it. She’s coming back next year, but with an even better schedule, because for the first time in her five years of teaching (Not counting her years of work as a sub, or her summer school experience, or the internship program she helped run and the computer skills class she taught as part of that program — want to know why she’s an excellent teacher? Because in addition to being a brilliant and sensitive and honest person, and in addition to knowing every single little thing about her subject, she has a ton of actual experience teaching. Unlike the administrators who give us our performance evaluations every year. BUT ANYWAY.) she will not be teaching middle school students who are all shoved into a mandatory art class that most of them don’t want. It’s awful to try to teach a subject to someone who doesn’t care about it and so doesn’t care if they learn or not, or if they pass or not; it’s especially tough when you love the subject and know the great value it can bring to lives, as my wife loves art, and as I love English.

Another good thing: in addition to the mandatory English classes I’ve always taught to students who don’t always want to learn English (It’s not as bad for me as it is for her: because I teach high school, not middle school. Middle schoolers are demons. My students are just annoying.), I got to teach my first elective this past year. It was a class in fantasy and science fiction literature, and though there were definitely some missteps, overall it went wonderfully well. It was fantastic to be able to select books because they mean something to my world as a nerd and a writer, rather than because they have lessons I think are important for students to learn; and the books I chose, though something of a mixed bag, generally went over quite well. I actually got a whole class full of students to read four complete novels this year, something I haven’t been able to do in the last two decades. They wrote short stories, and they participated in both discussions and in reading — and I didn’t give a single test. For the whole year. It was wonderful. It was also outstanding to feel vindicated in my choice of M.T. Anderson’s fantastic dystopian novel Feed, which I wanted to teach to my regular classes but was told I could not (Because the book uses dirty words, though with a clear and effective purpose), so I taught it to this class — and they loved it. And were deeply affected by it. One of my better teaching experiences.

(Lessons learned, by the way, from my missteps: The War of the Worlds is a seminal science fiction classic, but it is also as boring as snail snot. And Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a fantastic book, and an important book: but it is not much of a science fiction book. And it’s damn hard to read, because it does such a good job of depicting American chattel slavery. I think next year I will teach The Time Machine, and maybe Fahrenheit 451, and maybe Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.)

Another good thing: all of my best teacher friends were all around me this year, and they all helped support me; and they’re all coming back next year. I have an excellent group of teacher friends at the school, and that makes a world of difference in the teaching experience. As important as it was to me to have my wife there every day, these wonderful people are critical to my survival and stability as a teacher and a person. Thank you Lisa, Aleksandra, Danielle, Scott, and Toni (whom all the teachers refer to as “Not your Toni”) — and let’s add Carrie and Anasazi to the group, shall we? Thank you all for your friendship.

I also had a number of wonderful students this year, both academically and personally, and I think, despite my constant self-doubts, that I was able to help most of them to get better, to learn and improve, to grow as people and as readers and writers. Even though I teach because I need the income, it means quite a lot to me that I can teach well, that I can have an impact on my students, that I can make their futures better, their lives fuller, by imparting to them curiosity and insight and some of my passion for language and literature. That happened this year — it doesn’t always — and I am grateful that it did.

All right, so those are the good things.

The main thing that went badly this year was something I’ve hinted at in the good news: my friends, my wife, and I are all returning to the same school next year. Which is remarkable (as in something about which I can remark) because there are so many others who are not returning. Out of a staff of 38, there are TEN people who are not returning. More than 25%. I don’t want to get into too much detail about this, about the reasons for people leaving, because it would cross a line I don’t want to cross, in that I would end up criticizing my school for things I think they have done wrong, and I would have to do it in a specific and even personal way; but the real essential reason for everyone who is leaving is the same: teachers are not valued commensurate with our effort and our worth. We are not paid enough, not supported enough, not cared for enough. Some of my fellow staff members are being actively devalued, and some have simply grown fed up with not being valued enough; but the result is clear: the school is going to change. Maybe in some cases the replacements will be better, sure — but not in all cases. In the years I have been at this school, and more broadly in the years that I have been a teacher, I have watched teachers and staff members come and go; and it seems to me that in all cases, over time, the staff replacements have been for the worse. Partly that’s because teachers who care get better with experience, all the way up to the point where we get so bitter and jaded that we give up, and then we become much worse; so improvement generally happens with teachers who stay, not teachers who leave and are replaced; but part of that is because good teachers quit when they aren’t valued, and new people coming into the profession are not always good teachers, just by the law of averages. Now they’re not even coming into the profession: we had one position that just never really got filled this year, instead being temporarily patched by a string of substitutes; maybe they’ll fill that spot with a full-time teacher next year. Or maybe they won’t, and the students will suffer again with subs. Maybe, if they find someone, that teacher will even be a good teacher, or someone who may become a good teacher over time.

And maybe they won’t.

It’s hard to watch your school get worse. I feel bad for the students who come here. Not because they get a bad education; I think we still provide what we always have, a generally good and useful education with some definite holes. Partly that’s because there are still teachers who are staying, and who have gotten better over their years of teaching — and yes, I am one of those — and partly it’s because there have always been holes, always been areas where we lack (Arts, along with CTE and practical skills classes, have always been the most glaring lack at my small charter school, and it is the reason why probably 10% of our students leave the school every year to go to larger schools with more programs. Our graduating class every year is half the size of our incoming class.), so the holes are shifting more than they are growing. When I came to the school, they had an incredibly strong math department; now we have an incredibly strong English department. I don’t think one or the other of those is better or worse: they’re just different strengths. (Okay, the strong English department is better. Because math sucks.)

But though we still do our jobs, it’s getting harder. Because the problems exist which are driving teachers away. Every year it gets more and more tempting to follow them, and that means that every year, it gets more strenuous to stay where I am. I’m getting tired of fighting to survive at my school, fighting to overcome the bad policies, the bad atmosphere, the bad personalities that all contribute to the decision so many people have made to leave. I hope things start to get better, at some point. I really do. But in the meantime, I feel bad for the students because their school is in a constant state of flux. It makes them uncertain, of course, and it takes away their relationships and replaces the familiar teachers with a string of new faces. It strikes me that, every year, the students ask me if I will be there next year. Even the seniors ask this, so it’s not only because they want to take my class, or even to see me in the hall; they just want to know that I will still be there, because I am part of their school as they understand it.

The second thing that was difficult this school year was the students. Hold on, hold on: I’m not going to complain about how the students are getting worse; they’re not. I’m also not going to complain about how the students are the root cause of every problem with education — though they are, of course; I say all the time that this job would be a breeze if it weren’t for the students.

No, the trouble with students this year was that the students were troubled. I think I have to write about this in more depth, and before I do that I need to talk to a couple of my former students, and get their opinions on how school has been for them; but I think we don’t really know the harm that was done by the pandemic and the quarantine. I do also recognize that it’s too easy to point to that enormous black cloud, the crater that it left in our landscape, and blame it for all the problems we face; I don’t think the pandemic experience is the only factor influencing students today, or the root of all the problems in education, any more than I think students themselves are the root of all the problems in education today.

But it happened. And it happened to these kids. And I think for them, it changed — everything.

All students are different. I tend to think that the trends my fellow teachers always see in the students are generally false. For instance, it has frequently been observed to me that this class or that class is a “bad” class, or a tough class; and my experience has rarely been the same as what my colleagues have told me it would be, based on their experience. I’m sure it goes the other way, too: I have in the past warned my fellow teachers about students and classes I’ve had trouble with, and frequently those students and classes have been great for my colleagues. Because the problem is not that the students are bad: it’s that not every student works well with every teacher, and not every teacher handles everything the best way, nor does every student. Bad circumstances can sour a working relationship very quickly, and often it never really sweetens.

But see, I think that’s part of what happened with the pandemic and the quarantine. The schools didn’t handle it properly. I’m not sure there was a way to handle it properly: my Republican countrymen would argue that schools should have stayed open, but I think there’s no reasonable argument that such a policy would not have led to a hell of a lot more sickness, and that would have had a negative impact on students as well. So I don’t mean to find fault with what we did or how we did it; we did our best. But the reality is that it didn’t work. Teaching a class on Zoom is simply not effective: not when the teachers and students are familiar and comfortable with in-person learning. It’s a separate question whether Zoom made the situation better or worse; it seems to me that simply cancelling school entirely for six months or a year would have been worse — but there’s an argument to be made that giving everyone a break would have been better, and the students could have come back to where they left off, and simply graduated a year later, and so what? I’m a fan of gap years. If I could have used that year to prepare, on my own, for the next year’s classes, my God, what I would have achieved. On the other hand, in that scenario, social isolation would have been much, much worse; I can largely ignore that because I live with my best friend and my four favorite animal friends; but I recognize that many of my students would have suffered even more without being able to hear friendly voices and see friendly faces every day, even if it was just on a screen.

But the gap year, or bulling ahead through sickness, is not what we did. What we did was try our best to pretend that nothing was wrong: when everything was wrong. The students were miserable; the teachers were miserable; the entire world was miserable. The transmission of education online did not work: students were bored and constantly distracted. Teachers were frustrated and floundering. So the result is that teachers lost confidence, because we watched ourselves suck at our jobs for an entire year; students lost faith in schools, because they watched schools fail them for an entire year, and they also lost faith in themselves, because when they were entrusted with the responsibility of being at school while they weren’t at school, they pretty much all failed to live up to it. That is not an insult: there’s not a doubt in my mind that I would have spent the entire school year at home stoned and playing video games while pretending to do my work, if there had been a quarantine while I was a student. The point is that students should never have been given that responsibility. They weren’t ready for it, and so they were set up for failure: and they failed. At the same time, the schools failed: and the students were shown what was behind the curtain of the schools. They saw that their teachers are not wizards, but, too often, traveling salesmen trying desperately to maintain a facade. The advantage we teachers have always had is that, frequently, just like the Wizard of Oz, the facade is enough: students are able to learn enormous amounts on their own, so if I can give them a poem which I myself don’t understand, and then just seem wise when I say, “Well what do YOU think it means?” Students have been able to pull real knowledge and improvement out of that — which knowledge they frequently then teach me. So as long as students had faith that we were really guiding them in the right direction, we were able to move them in the right direction even if we didn’t actually know the path ourselves. Because students could find the way.

But students saw that we couldn’t always get it right, that we didn’t always know the answer: and I think they don’t trust us any more. Combine that with their knowledge, gained from a year so far out in the wilderness that a path forward didn’t exist, and so they couldn’t get anywhere no matter how fast they ran in circles, that they themselves can’t always come up to snuff (This is not true, by the way — but there’s a certain amount of faith, which requires a certain amount of innocence, and these kids don’t have it, for the same reason: they realized that their ruby slippers are just shoes, with no magic at all, and that means they don’t have the ability to make the magic happen. The magic is still there, where it always has been, inside them; but if they don’t believe in it, they’ll never achieve it.), and the constant drumbeat all around in our society these days about how school is maybe not necessary and maybe even bad, how college is maybe not necessary and definitely too expensive — and who could blame them for giving up a little? Or a lot?

So what we have, what we had this year, is a school full of students who maybe don’t see the point of school, and so maybe they don’t do their part. They don’t do their assignments. They don’t pay attention in school. What’s more — what’s made this year much harder — they don’t really care about their grades, or about passing and graduating, no matter what their teachers say. They maybe don’t care as much about what their teachers say, either about the subject matter or about what’s important in life. Because they lost faith in us, and in schools, and in themselves. This is not true of all of them, I have to say; we always have students who are successful, and those show that the school system is not lost, is not entirely broken; but there are a lot of students now who don’t seem to see the point. And as a teacher, there’s nothing harder to deal with than students who don’t see the point.

I would like to apologize to all of my former teachers for what I put them through: because I was one of those kids. I must have been hell to deal with, for a lot of them. I’m sorry for that. Believe me, I’m getting my just desserts now.

So that has been this past year. It should be no wonder that I had a tough time with it. It should also be no wonder that so many of my colleagues are leaving now, that so many teaching jobs are hard to fill, and getting harder. I don’t mean to excuse my school, to put all the blame for the departures on the bad situation with the students; my school has made the problem much, much worse. But what’s more important is that the schools, and the teachers, and everyone else involved — including themselves — we all have to try not to make the situation worse for the students. Because they don’t have a lot of options. They don’t have a lot of opportunities to learn what they need to learn. If they can’t do it now, they may never get it right. And the more years they go through without succeeding, by their standards or ours, the harder it will get to actually succeed. If we keep failing them, we fail.

And then what?

How bad could it actually get?

Boy, good thing I didn’t write about sad things this week, huh?