While I was still a teacher, I took great comfort in what a noble, self-sacrificing and necessary profession I was engaged in, telling myself that the kids made it all worth it. I do miss many of the kids and there really were surprisingly wonderful moments with many of the students. But, and this is a big but, the raging teenage hormones, the apathy and disillusionment of the almost surly student body, the scary group dynamics and peer pressure that expose the darkest sides of human nature (Yes, Lord of the Flies is completely realistic and I often thought to myself that watching the group dynamics made me understand better why the holocaust was able to occur.), witnessing the numbness to it all which your colleagues have already developed and which you find yourself being forced to develop in order to survive emotionally in a negative and stressful daily environment, your role as a task master and doler out of punishments, the realization that you have more in common with a drill sergeant than an educator and then add the lousy pay, the constant criticism from the school administration, many of your colleagues (Who you would think would band together in a stressful, mine ridden environment, but mostly do not.) and many of the parents to the mix, the toll it takes on your body and your immune system cannot be ignored. Now that the constant ringing in my ears has stopped, I regret to report that for me it just really wasn’t worth it.
I have met many intelligent, interesting former teachers and the ones I have met, don’t seem to miss it. It is also no coincidence that many writers, musicians, actors, inventors and politicians are or were former teachers who found ways out of the profession. Charlotte Brontë, Sir William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies), Sting, J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, Steven King, Sheryl Crow, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert Frost, John Adams, Art Garfunkel, and Mr. T (Now, that is physical body I would have wanted to inhabit as a teacher, as children, not unlike dogs, listen to men more than to women.), Alexander Graham Bell, Roberta Flack, Andy Griffith, etc., etc.
You can begin to hate teaching so much that you surprise yourself with sudden bursts of creativity and motivation stemming from the very real need to get the hell out of Dodge. It should come as no surprise to me that my favorite author, Charlotte Brontë, loathed being a teacher/governess and my favorite book, Jane Eyre, upon closer inspection was her fictional escape from her dull, tedious daily life as a governess for a wealthy family. Hmmm… Rich nobleman falls in love with his poor as a church mouse governess who has to leave him to earn a living as a village school teacher because she discovers he already has a crazy, violent wife imprisoned in the attic. But ,due to a fire crazy wife dies, he is conveniently enough blinded and in need of Jane’s constant care, ergo, she gets to quit her job as a teacher, marry him and have a baby! The older I get, the more reasons I seem to find as to why Jane Eyre is my favorite book of all time. I bet Charlotte Brontë’s biological clock was ticking as loudly as mine when she wrote Jane Eyre at the age of 31. By 19th century standards she was well past being considered an old maid when she wrote Jane Eyre. She finally married at the age of 37 and sadly enough her writing career and life were cut tragically short when she died due to pregnancy complications at the age of 38 in 1855 . For those times, she was dangerously old to be having a baby. I wonder if she had similar thoughts to my own. Often as a teacher, I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t I rather have my own child to raise and educate as I see fit, instead of giving all of my life’s blood to the children of other people who never agree with how I am educating their children, anyway?” and “Wouldn’t I rather give my time and energy to a child or children whom I would love and who would love me?”
In short, as a public school teacher in Germany, I found myself turning into a person I really didn’t want to be. I didn’t recognize myself anymore and I had little or no energy left for my boyfriend, my family and friends (the people who really matter in my life and keep me going). Now, if I could only start writing a bestseller on the back of a pub napkin like J.K. Rowling or write a famous song about my experiences as a teacher, like Sting or, of course, penning a breakthrough novel for women’s literature like Charlotte Brontë wouldn’t be half bad either.
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