An End to a Teacher’s Journey

By James William Hall

This August, for the first time in fourteen years, I did not stand at my door to greet my English students on the opening day of school. I was at home.  I did not get up at five am the morning of the first day to prepare to teach; I did not gather materials for the first week of class introductions; I did not write lesson plans; I did not attend the first week of professional development. when teachers learn new skills, meet to focus their curriculum, and discuss goals for the coming year.

Instead, when I awoke-at seven am, I felt the hollowness that comes from giving up a familiar thing, a comfortable thing, a thing that’s been a part of my life for so long. I missed it.  I felt like a spare tire on a Jeep-ready, but not being used. Yet, at the same time I felt great relief, for it was like deciding not to run again in the annual marathon after running in so many. Teaching became an exhausting journey that I can no longer take.

Why? Each year in June, for the past thirteen years, I have finished a ten-month teacher’s journey begun the previous August.  These academic years are both exhilarating and exhausting. Exhilarating to meet my seniors, a group of kids that I grow to care a lot about. I see them graduate and realize dreams of going to college and pursuing careers. I go to their graduation ceremonies, pose for pictures with them in caps and gowns, hug them and wish them well as they launch themselves out into the world.  They are so happy and so relieved, and so am I, knowing how difficult their senior-year journey was.

But to reach exhilaration requires a lot of work and stress and just plain drudgery first.  There is the tedium of daily classes, repeated period after period, and days of lessons, drilling in the habits of reading and writing which must be mastered.  There is a daily review of what will be taught tomorrow. There is longer-range planning for the week and month ahead. There is the time needed, after classes, for students’ requests for help with scholarship letters and admission essays and figuring out college applications, documents that are lengthy and varied. And there is always the grading of papers and tests that frequently takes up the weekend, for I must give at least two grades per week to each student.

This average week is busy and taxing, but add all the weeks on top of each other, week after week, 40 weeks in all, 180 days of instruction as provided by law, and exhaustion builds. My students grow tired of school and become cranky. I grow tired of their crankiness. I struggle, with the other senior teachers, to keep them on track to graduate, knowing that for them to fail now means no diploma in June. Towards the end of second semester it’s a race to see who is going to collapse first-exhausted seniors or their teacher. Recently, I am the one who loses.

Add to this busy schedule the increased and urgent emphasis on testing, and you add further joyless, debilitating activity. There’s an appalling number of required tests. FCAT (now replaced by the FSA), a state-wide reading and writing test required to advance in grades and ultimately graduate, is an insistent presence. There are annual tests of proficiency for students for whom English is a second language, called CELLA, which can take up to a week to give. Add End of Course examines, and the Benchmark Exams to measure progress in those, and the PSAT and SAT exams to measure readiness for college. Add still more practice tests to prepare for all these tests.

Studying for tests, taking tests and analyzing test results has become a permanent part of the teacher’s academic calendar.  Testing is no longer just an end-of-the-semester or end-of-the year-thing, but a several times a quarter thing, with benchmark and practice tests spaced in between.  And everything else we try to do must be dropped when the test date is due. This heavy testing schedule breaks up my larger literacy goals like teaching novels or plays or epic poems that I used to relish sharing with my students. I have been forced to try to work in bits and pieces of these works, but always keeping an eye out for the next scheduled practice test coming up quickly.

More and more time for teachers is spent training to give these tests, to handle tests, to review test scores with students and to adjust class time to reteach areas in tests where students have fallen short.  Many days walking the aisles as a test proctor takes the place of language instruction. And as our students are forced to take these tests, over and over, they become tense and sullen. Students rebel at their test load and the stress of taking these exams, which have high stakes-graduation, college admission, and grade level advancement.

The literature that doesn’t appear on the tests-poetry, novels, quality videos, and even short stories-aren’t considered to be practice for the exams.  These things aren’t banned outright-in fact, there are AP courses where they are front and center and the smartest kids get exposed to them. But the average English student needs work on her non-fiction reading, which the standardized tests do measure, so that is where we spend the most time instructing. Great literature will have to wait for college to be read, if at all.

Adding to the testing fatigue is the summer vacation schedule, which used to be the time to recuperate, travel, reflect, read books, and write. Summer is now a busy off-season for teachers, a time for staff development, preparing or revising end-of-course exams, training in incorporating new computers and new software suites for instruction, and for attending trainings to meet the new prerequisites to the teaching certificate that the state legislature adds each year.  By the time I have met all these obligations, and feel like I can begin to enjoy my off time, it’s just about time to report back to school.

So this year I have left the school door behind.  I will miss all the wonderful students and my amazing colleagues that I shared work and discussions with; I will miss this year’s academic milestones and graduations. I will miss sharing my enthusiasm for great literature and getting the aha! moment in class.  I will always be proud to have been a teacher, one of most honorable and vital professions of our nation and the world.  Thanks to the people who gave me the chance to teach. My race is run.