Hey Teachers, It's Not Okay To Cry In Your Car

I was walking to my portable classroom on a sun-piercing October morning, carrying my cheap school-issued laptop, worksheets printed the day before (because you never knew if the copier would be working) and a small cooler (since I never had time to make it to the teachers’ lounge during lunch) when my phone dinged.

Just read this, thought of you. xo

It was a link to an NPR article about the difficulty of first-year teaching and the supports that can help a new teacher get through October’s “disillusionment phase.” The article was entitled, “Hey, New Teachers, It’s OK To Cry In Your Car.”

I felt a twitch of anger move through me.

What kind of gaslighting fuckery is this?

By the time I had a chance to read the article in its entirety, three other friends had sent it to me. They knew what a hard school year I was having. Newly credentialed and working on my MEd, I’d been hired at an infamous Watts high school to teach four sections of tenth-grade intervention English, a course designed to help students pass the California high school exit exam. Several weeks into the school year, however, the exam was deemed discriminatory and discontinued. I was then teaching a remedial class in one of LA’s toughest high schools, with no curriculum and no purpose.

Looking back, it’s almost laughable how bad it was. Almost. Kids literally danced on the tables, got into fist fights and played music during class. I could write a whole essay about the why’s of their behavior, but basically, they were getting screwed by our society and they knew it. They were in the “dumb” class, and they knew that too. They were pissed and honestly, I don’t blame them.

But I was a first-year teacher and I didn’t know how to address their needs, let alone how to teach them, well, anything, really. In hindsight, it seems obvious—turn it into a creative writing class, build buy-in and confidence through narrative, and then transfer those literacy skills to academic reading and writing.

Lacking the experience to realize that, I instead worked myself into the ground, working twelve-hour days and taking courses to complete a master’s program. After “teaching” all day, I either drove to UCLA or went home to spend hours struggling to create lesson plans with measurable objectives, as well as the slide decks and worksheets to accompany them.

My experience may have been extreme, but first-year teaching is rough for everyone. I’ve heard it compared to trying to build an airplane and fly it at the same time. I’ve heard another person say that they’ve “never worked so hard to be so bad at something.”

First-year teaching in the US is much harder than it needs to be. One reason is that American credential programs underprepare teachers. Compared to those in high-achieving countries, American teacher preparation programs are less selective, less rigorous, and shorter in duration—as short as seven weeks in an alternative credential program like Teach For America.

Coupled with the impossible expectations, overwhelming workload and unpaid overtime all teachers face, it’s no surprise that attrition rates for new teachers are higher than those for more experienced teachers. You’ve probably heard of the oft-cited statistic that 44% of teachers leave the profession within their first five years. At my Watts school, six teachers left during the first semester alone.

And October is the month it starts to all come crashing down.

Referred to as “Shocktober” at my school, DEVOLSON by teacher blogs, October has been dubbed the “disillusionment phase” for new teachers. The first-month honeymoon has worn off (did I ever get one?) and now you’re in the grind of the work and power struggles—with the added fun of midterm grades! I remember a very scientific graph shared in one of my grad school classes—looking at the looooong downslope leading into winter break, and feeling my stomach sink with it.

Everyone’s got ideas of how to help new teachers—and none of it involves the reduced workloads or extensive, government-subsidized training found in high-achieving countries.

The NPR article suggested mentorship and inspirational emails. This thing was, I was receiving both of those. I had a school-based mentor as well as one through my grad program. My admin (who were actually pretty good, just in a similarly impossible situation) did nice things like buy us El Pollo Loco and donuts. They also did less helpful things, like having us do coloring meditations during PD and sending uplifting Friday memes: “Fall nine times, get up ten.”

It was my first taste of the toxic positivity and gaslighting that run rampant in education.

Plenty has been written about toxic positivity on teacher blogs—and honestly, amen. I’d argue that the phenomenon is magnified when aimed at new teachers. The overwhelming majority of new teachers are in their 20s and female—AKA society’s favorite demographic to gaslight. There’s a certain condescending, infantilizing quality to the “helpful” and “motivating” teacher memes, an insistence that we be superhuman and endlessly self-sacrificing, that I really don’t think would be aimed at folks in a male-dominated profession.

The thing is, I wasn’t a typical new teacher, fresh out of undergrad. I was in my early 30s. I’d been in the workforce for fifteen years. I’d done hard things: gotten sober, moved overseas by myself, lost loved ones in tragic and untimely ways. I wasn’t even a new teacher; I’d taught for two years at an international kindergarten in Hanoi. While it was a completely different environment than an American public school—a well-resourced private school full of third-culture embassy kids—I wasn’t totally green to lesson planning, assessment, and classroom management.

I knew that teaching didn’t have to be this hard.

And I knew my friends who’d sent the article were just trying to help. Everyone, from my mentors to my co-workers, even to my admin—they were all trying to help. But the reality is that they couldn’t do much. There’s only so much individuals can do to help when an entire system and structure is designed to exploit you.

Like mentorship and memes included in the NPR article, the supports I received as a new teacher were well-intended. They may have even helped some, but they didn’t actually do anything to change my impossible situation. Saying that these tools support teachers is a bit like claiming the washing machine was part of the feminist revolution and liberated women. It may help you manage your oppression better, but it does nothing to actually dismantle the unjust conditions. It’s not liberatory. Even if it takes less time, you’re still the one stuck washing everyone’s dirty knickers.

But the thing is, it’s not just new teachers who cry in their cars. How many posts have I seen on FB groups from veterans who admit to crying every day? How many overwhelmed coworkers, pushed over the edge by student behavior or some ridiculous new mandate, have sat in my classroom after school crying? Too goddamn many.

“I witnessed it multiple points in my career,” Heath Madom said during his recent interview. “Sitting with a colleague while they're crying and just breaking down. You're trying to be there for them, but at the same time, you’re just like, ‘This is so fucked.’ Everyone comes into the job because they want to do something good, and yet what you end up contending with is just so messed up.”

In a response article, other teachers wrote in saying the job still made them cry. (Are we supposed to be comforted by that?) One claimed that crying is a good thing; it means you still care. (Gaslight, much?) Another repeated the vapid platitude that “what we do is worth doing well.” (In case it’s news to you, it is possible to do a job well without having emotional breakdowns.) Others offered coping tools such as lattes, hugs and a glass of wine.

(As a sober person, numbing out through alcohol wasn’t an option. I actually think my first-year teaching would have been more bearable if I’d had the luxury of checking out and managing my stress through alcohol or weed, like a lot of my co-workers.)

The article was intended to reduce the shame and help new teachers not feel alone. However, it did the opposite for me. Knowing that I wasn’t the only one crying in my car actually made me more mad.

How did this get normalized? In what other profession is it expected that grown-ass adults regularly have emotional breakdowns?

No, NPR, it’s not okay.

The job shouldn’t be this hard. Teachers are not combat troops. We’re not first responders or ER doctors or doing humanitarian aid in war zones. There’s no reason we should be pushed to this point, nothing inherent about instruction that should create this level of stress and trauma. To say anything otherwise is nothing but a pile of gaslighting, toxic positivity BS.

I was so infuriated by the NPR article that I wanted to write my own op-ed in response. But I was a first-year teacher. I was working twelve hours a day and commuting to UCLA to complete my master’s—I didn’t have the time or emotional bandwidth to function, let alone write. (Thus this post has been brewing in me for nine years.)

Things got worse as the semester wore on. I lost 15 pounds. My immune system shot, I was frequently sick and lived on DayQuil. I still got up and went to work every day, but I felt like I was getting into a very small boat inside myself and paddling further and further away from everything and everyone.

A couple of months after this fabulous article came out, I reached a breaking point. One night, I broke down and cried harder than I’ve ever cried. I’d been crying in my car for months, but this was different. For hours, I couldn’t stop. My face was raw and swollen. There’s only been a couple of times I’ve looked in the mirror and been scared of what I saw looking back, and that was one of them.

The next morning, I drove to Kaiser Psychiatric and did an intake. I ended up going on a three-week stress leave. (“Oh yeah, I did that,” the teacher in the classroom next door told me. “I got shingles my first year!”) I was totally numb during that time; I watched all of Breaking Bad and remember none of it. The doctors decided to up my anti-depressant dosage. While my history of depression certainly played a role in the intensity of my breakdown, the fact still remained that my job had driven me to that point.

I returned from leave and finished the school year, before transferring to another school and eventually becoming a decent teacher. So I got out okay. I can’t say the same for my students, who, already behind in literacy, missed out on another year of quality instruction.

They were the real losers in all this—my off-the-wall, crazy-ass students who were good kids, most of them, underneath it all. They deserved better than what I was able to give them, better than the husk of a person I became for the rest of that school year. I was just one in a revolving door of new teachers who came to that school and left. “At least you made it to the end of the year,” one student told me sadly. “Most of em just quit.”

This wasn’t a lark, of course. It’s well-documented that poor black and brown students are more likely to have inexperienced teachers, a factor that serves to deepen educational inequality. We know that low-income schools see higher rates of teacher turnover, which negatively impacts student achievement.

As always, teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions.

My master’s program at UCLA was centered around social justice. I ended the thesis I wrote that school year with the statement: “We can’t have social justice for students if we don’t have it for teachers.”

I still stand by that.

So, teachers, cry in your car if you need to. Just don’t feel ashamed.

Feel angry.