Every Day I Have to Cry Some: Reflections on Teaching

Last weekend I was at a wedding making conversation with some people I had just met. I had had a glass of wine and some food at this point, and the relentless late-summer sun was beginning to set, so I was loosened up and comfortable enough to chat honestly. We were asking and responding to the normal get to know you questions, and when I was asked what I do for work and said I’m an English teacher at a community college, the person said “Ooooh! Do you love it?” with a tone that implied that a “yes” answer was a foregone conclusion. Not wanting to disappoint her but also wanting to be honest, I took a long pause before saying something uninspiring but totally true like “um, it’s complicated. It’s a good fit for me.” Then I went on to tell a story about how my husband recently pointed out that the terrible neck pain I get a few times a year isn’t timed randomly. It always comes at the end of a term of teaching. “So yeah…..” I said “it’s a cool job, but I guess it does stress me out, haha.” 

The truth is, I don’t know if I’ve ever “loved” a job. It’s just not a word I’d use to describe something I wouldn’t do unless I was being paid. And yes, I can confidently say I would not teach if I wasn’t getting paid. I know some people would (or say they would) and I know that in America it’s the one job where we want people to not only do a good job, but to wax poetic about their adoration for the job despite the contempt that is hurled at them almost constantly from our culture. So to use a phrase my students love: In this essay, I will discuss why I like teaching enough to do it until I retire, but I can’t tell a stranger at a wedding that I love it. 

Not a safe space: stalkers, shooters, and shitty pension

After the Umpqua Community College shooting in 2015, in which a student in Roseburg, Oregon showed up at his Writing 115 class and shot his professor and 8 classmates, I started going to therapy. It’s common at PCC for the president of the school to send out emails after national tragedies and encourage students and employees to use free counseling services. The reality is that the student counseling is almost impossible to get into (too much demand, not enough supply) and that instructors get a mere 5 sessions covered by insurance. Five sessions isn’t exactly life changing, and I didn’t have the money to continue, but I figured I’d take what I could get. After the shooting, it was hard for me to get out of the car when I got to campus; I had a crippling fear that one of my students would kill me. I had been teaching Writing 115 at several Oregon community colleges for 3 years at that point. My students were also sometimes full of rage, and unpredictable, and had access to guns (this is America). In my therapy sessions, the talk quickly moved from my anxiety about getting gunned down at work to my exhaustion from my students' trauma dumping on me relentlessly. The therapist said I had second-hand trauma from my students’ trauma, but I wasn’t so sure that was it. Or at least not all of it. Even in therapy, I felt that I had to perform altruism, emphasizing how empathetic I was towards my students’ suffering. And I was. I am. But what I felt like I couldn't say was that I also resented my students for dumping so much trauma on me, and I resented the system for leaving teachers to deal with every injustice that our students experience and all the emotional baggage it leaves them with, despite the fact that we have no resources or training to do so. I resented that my students sometimes made me feel afraid for my life, but somehow my class was their social safety net. And most of all, I resented the fact that no one would ever do something to make us safer. Lockdown drills and news of school shootings were and continue to be ceaseless, the fabric of our existence in America. 

In 2022 the shooting that I so feared finally happened at my school. Or at least for almost two hours I thought it did. I was prepping for my 10am class in the big cubicle space where all the writing and ESOL instructors work when the lockdown alarm went off. Lights flashed from the corners of the room and a robotic voice came screaming out of the loudspeakers saying there was an active shooter threat, the campus was in lockdown, and we should “RUN, FIGHT, OR HIDE.” There were specific instructions for each option, and since we’d never rehearsed running or fighting, but we’d rehearsed hiding quite a lot, me and all the other people in the vicinity opted for HIDE. We went into a little conference room, which it turned out had a huge glass window with no blinds and a door with no lock. The robotic voice that was screaming through the loud speaker said to turn off the lights, close the blinds, and lock the doors. We could only do one out of three and then panic set in. 

Huddled on the floor with my colleagues, we frantically tried to speculate about what was going on. Someone called their spouse. Someone googled “shooting PCC.” I cried. It surprised me at first. I haven’t been through anything like that before, and I tend to be pretty calm in a crisis, but my impulse was to weep. It was pretty contained and didn’t last long. My sense of time in the room is warped, and I know we were in there for an hour and a half total, but at some point it became clear that there was no shooter on campus. Maybe it was 10 minutes into it, maybe it was an hour. It felt like an hour. First we got wind that there was a shooter at the high school up the street. This induced a new panic for those with kids, but then the story changed again and there was just a shooter “in the area.” The alarm continued to blair for the full hour and half, shouting the “RUN, FIGHT, HIDE” instructions every time. But by the end of it, we’d learned that there was simply “Police activity” in the area.

When we were finally free to resume normal activities (ha ha), it was halfway through my class meeting time. I booked it over to my classroom to see if anyone was there. The alarm had sounded about 15 minutes before class was supposed to start and a handful of my students had gotten to the classroom early and then been stuck there alone through the whole lockdown ordeal. I was gutted that I hadn’t been there with them. They seemed shaken up and showed me that the blinds in the classroom were broken, so they had an entire wall of windows that was visible from the parking lot. Some were more flippant about the whole thing, citing a lifetime of lockdown drills throughout their school career. “Could I still read their rough draft?” they wanted to know.  To them, this was just another day. I told them we didn’t have to have class if they were too shaken up, but several students wanted to stay and work on their essays. I did my best to switch gears and give them feedback on sentence structure and paragraph organization for the rest of class. So much of this job is switching from survival mode (sometimes them, sometimes me) to something that seems weirdly granular and unimportant by comparison. By the end of the day we got word that there was no active shooter at all. A man had set a car on fire, and when police showed up they shot and killed him because they thought he had a gun. He didn’t. I am still sometimes afraid when I go to campus, but it’s hard to know who to be afraid of. 

Where I work, all concerns about student behavior get funneled through the Office of Student Conduct and Retention. Right there in the title is the key to what they do: retention. The goal is always to keep a student around. Apparently, the conduct part of the title is not super important. No matter how a student conducts themself, we want to keep them around. I have had to report two students for “conduct” reasons, and both times I was afraid for my safety. The first was a man in his 50s or 60s who I tutored in the writing center. He was friendly and after our tutoring session he got my name so he could try to take a class with me in the future. This was a common occurrence and I mostly forgot about it. Then one day the following term, I got an email from him asking for my teaching schedule for the next term so he could take a class from me. This was odd since he obviously had my name and he could just search the schedule when it came out (which he was clearly capable of since he was able to find my email address). I didn’t respond right away, and  when I was leaving my classroom that day, he was waiting outside the class for me. I was startled because I barely remembered him and I’d just gotten the email that day, and there he was waiting for me. I said something like “Oh! How did you find me?” and he said “I’m smarter than I look. I looked up your teaching schedule for this quarter online and waited outside for you until your class let out.” I was visibly rattled, and after he left, another teacher who had been in the hallway asked me if I was okay and told me that the situation sounded weird. He tracked me down a second time in the hallway that week, and at that point I was freaked out.

 It was 2017 in the midst of the #metoo movement, and I was uncomfortable with a huge older man memorizing my schedule and coming to find me on campus if I didn’t answer his emails quickly enough. A few years earlier there had been a student who frequented the writing center where I tutored and he always made me uncomfortable. His entitlement and casual sexism rubbed me the wrong way, and I was horrified  but unsurprised when I came in one day to see his mugshot on the breakroom wall with a sign saying he was no longer allowed on campus. My coworker told me the police had escorted him off campus because he assaulted someone at the other tutoring center. We googled him and found that he was currently on trial for 9 counts of rape. All that to say, I wasn’t in a hurry to ignore my instincts this time. I knew it was just as likely that this guy was harmless, but women don’t really have the luxury of giving people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to our safety. Several colleagues encouraged me to submit a report to the office of student conduct and retention, so I did. Then began a long process that created a lot of work for me and made me feel even less safe.  

I mostly regret taking any action at all. I basically just wanted to make sure this student couldn’t take a class from me. It quickly became clear that the school couldn’t do that, but what they wanted was for me to email him and tell him not to take a class with me. They said technically he had a right to register for whatever class he wanted. I did not, it seemed, have any rights. The dean of student conduct offered to “help me write an email” asking him not to contact me. Since then I’ve learned that this is the main service that the Office of Student Conduct and Retention offers: telling you to write an email to the student who is making you feel unsafe. Honestly, the details of the rest of the ordeal are foggy to me now, probably because I wanted to forget. But they coached me to send him an email asking him never to contact me again.  He was outraged by this and it escalated the situation. He wrote me a slanderous review online, he met with the dean to express his outrage. He continued to take classes on campus for years and I was constantly vigilant, making sure to avoid him if I saw him from afar. Sometimes public safety walked me to my car when I was there at night.  After a year or so, when my guard was finally down, I was subbing for a class and he was in the class that used the classroom after me. I had no choice but to be in the same room for 10 minutes during class change over. He loudly muttered “I hate female writing teachers” over and over for the full 10 minutes, making the rest of the students visibly scared and uncomfortable. I practically ran to my car when the period was over. I continued to see him on campus for three years.

A few years later, a student who we’ll call Cathy registered for my online Writing 122 class. She’d taken a British Literature class with me the previous year, and it went fine. She made an ordeal about critiquing one of my assignments, but I don’t have a lot of ego about these things so I engaged with her critique and thanked her for starting the conversation and that was that. But in WR122 she came in swinging her fists. It was an online summer class and the first week took place during a record breaking heat wave that killed over a dozen people in the Portland area.  I wrote an email to students with a general overview of the course work for the week, but also said something to the effect of “I know it feels like we are living through the apocalypse, but hang in there!” and then included a list of cooling shelters and resources for the heat wave and some general commiseration about the heat. She emailed me back directly and said that she didn’t need to hear my personal opinions and I should just stick to the course material when I sent emails. I was taken aback by her antagonism as my email had been pretty standard and the tone and inclusion of personal voice is considered best practice for online classes so students can tell that their instructor is real and present. I told her that the emails are just a courtesy, but all the materials for the class are posted in our class webpage and I could leave her off the emails in the future if she’d like. She emailed me back, enraged, and accused me of trying to withhold important class information from her. Thus began a pattern for the remainder of the term. She refused to do assignments, accused me of prying for personal information about my students and trying to form “parasocial relationships” with them when I asked them to write about themselves or reflect on the assigned reading with examples from their own lives (writing about reflection and personal connection are standard outcomes for the course). I was always calm and collected with her, and offered her alternative assignments each time she complained. She used the discussion board to criticize me and say that all my discussion questions were prying and inappropriate (for example: I had assigned an article about confirmation bias and asked them to give an example that they’d observed in their own life. She said it was unsafe to share personal examples online and likened me to a cult leader, trying to control my students through emotional manipulation). I submitted a student of concern report to the Office of Student Conduct and Retention because her accusations and paranoia were getting increasingly unhinged and her emails to me were bordering on harassment. She seemed to be fixated on the idea that I was trying to pry into her personal life via my assignment prompts. Of course the student conduct folks offered to help me write an email to her, and other than that they didn’t have any ideas. Once again, I just wanted to be protected from a student that scared me, or at least have a paper trail if things escalated. And of course they did. For her final assignment, she ignored the prompt and wrote a 6 page paper about me, outlining every issue that she had with me and once again accusing me of trying to force her to share personal information as a method of control and manipulation. I sent the assignment as well as all of her harassing emails to the student retention folks, and they agreed that it was troubling but said “Okay, what do you want us to do?” I said “I want you to make sure that she can’t register for another class with me. She has a consistent pattern of harassment and unfounded accusations.” They said they couldn’t do that because she had a right to take whatever class she wants, and then they offered once again to help me (a writing instructor) write an email (to a student who I want to cease contact with). I declined, saying that I felt strongly that emailing her would escalate the situation. Eventually the department chair had to step in and assure me that he’d change my teaching schedule if she tried to take another class with me. I could tell story after story of how scenarios much scarier that these two have played out for my colleagues: stalkers, white supremacists, threats. But I’ve never heard of the school taking action until there’s physical violence. After which, as we know all too well, it’s always too late. 

A few years ago I finally started getting serious about my finances. The first step was learning what the hell PERS was. PERS stands for Public Employee Retirement System  and it’s the pension plan that’s set up for public sector employees in Oregon. The specific PERS plan that applies to community college instructors is shared also with firefighters and police officers, with some key differences between the plans offered to each different vocation. Namely, everything is worse for teachers. Firefighters and police officers can retire 5 years earlier than teachers, they need to accrue fewer years of service in order to retire,  and they get larger pension payments overall when they do retire.  There’s no stated explanation for this. Bureaucratic systems seldom have to explain themselves. But to me, the explanation is self-evident: teachers are literally less valuable. Less money is allocated to us in our working life and in our retirement. Firefighters’ and police officers’ jobs are viewed as riskier, more important, and deserving of better benefits and pay. And it’s true that they may be more often in the line of fire. But we are certainly asked to be in that line as well, with significantly less preparation, support, or reward for it. 

Speaking of benefits, a few years ago all the instructors got a $10 gift card to the campus cafeteria for teacher appreciation week. Last year when the college didn't even open the cafeteria for the first week of classes, the school gave out $7 gift cards to the food trucks they brought to campus. 

The day to day

At PCC, all writing instructors are required to conference one on one with their students. Depending on the term, I have 50-75 students, and if I’m teaching all writing classes, then I need to meet individually with all of my students at least once (twice if the meeting is shorter). No other department requires this, so for many students who pass through PCC, their writing instructors are the only instructors they ever connect with one on one. As a result (at least this is my theory), we have a pretty different relationship with our students than other instructors. 

Here’s what we get: closer relationships to our students, more students who take multiple classes with us, better chances of intervening and helping when a student is having a hard time, higher likelihood of being asked to write recommendation letters. Cool! But, what we also get is a lot of trauma dumping and disclosures. Any given week, my students tell me about their medical problems, their mental health diagnoses, their romantic life, their relationships with their parents, their ennui, their depression, their gender dysphoria, their suicidal ideation, their self hatred, their climate anxiety, their generalized anxiety, their social anxiety, their abusive spouse, their eating disorder, their manic episode, their misophonia, their upcoming medical procedures, their other teachers who are mean, and their hopes and dreams. The list goes on. And honestly, I am honored that they feel safe sharing their lives with me. Connecting with students on a personal level is one of the reasons I do love my job at times. But it is exhausting. And often it’s also deeply inappropriate, and I am in way over my head. (To be clear, I’m never asking them to share these things. I usually say something innocuous and vague like “How’s it going? How can I help you with ____ assignment?” and that’s all it takes.)  In case you’re questioning my credentials to deal with this, I have a Masters of Arts in English Literature. So. . . absolutely no credentials to speak of. 

Campus bathroom selfie circa 2019, dressed up to teach Poe, not credentialed as a therapist. 

My very first term teaching, I was initiated into this part of my job quickly and painfully when a student disclosed her sexual assault and subsequent pregnancy during our conference in response to me asking her a vague question like “how is the term going?” Fresh out of graduate school, 28 years old, and probably running late for my next class, I was completely taken aback. I had barely learned how to teach in graduate school, and I certainly hadn’t learned how to counsel someone after sexual assault and an unwanted pregnancy. I think I at least knew to direct her to some resource centers, but I mostly just listened. Now this is what I’ve come to expect as a normal part of my job. I include language about mandatory reporting in my syllabus because disclosures like this are so common, and I regularly refer students to counseling, the Women’s Resource Center, and various other support services offered by the city.  

One thing that happens when you become the interlocutor of choice for your students is that you learn quickly not to take any of their behavior personally. Ask a student who falls asleep every day during class if everything is okay and she will tell you that she works a night shift at a factory to support her family while they wait for her father to be granted a visa to join them from Somalia. Check in with a student who gets up constantly to leave class and answer her phone and she will burst into tears and tell you that her boyfriend was just deported and no one has heard from him since. She just wants to hear news that he’s safe, so she runs out in the hall to answer her phone every time it buzzes. Ask a student if they plan to turn in that overdue assignment and they will tell you that their mom overdosed again, and they wanted to finish their homework, but had to stay in the hospital with her all night. Can they have another day?  

TV and movies about college would have us believe that students and professors are always locked in some battle over respect or laziness, and I suppose that’s sometimes the case, but overwhelmingly I find that my students’ behavior is rarely about their respect for me at all. It’s about all the other things going on in their lives besides my class. While the school where I work certainly pays lip service to offering wrap around services to help students with all these outside issues, it’s teachers who are on the frontlines, and we’re usually the only ones who are held accountable when a student does not pass a class in the midst of a life-altering trauma. At one point PCC administrators introduced a new system of assigning classes to adjuncts in which there would be a file on each instructor and we’d be assigned points based on everything from our pass rates to how many professional development seminars we’d attended. While pass rates can be an important indicator of how an instructor is doing, I was struck that administrators didn’t take into account all the other reasons that students might fail a class–the personal reasons that have nothing to do with the class material and everything to do with the drama of life in America. But of course they didn’t take those things into account. Writing teachers are probably the only ones that get that information in a steady stream, straight from our students’ mouths. After all, no one else at the school is required to meet with them one on one every term in addition to seeing them multiple times a week in class and reading their writing weekly.  

Of course there are so many beautiful things that come out of these relationships with students as well. I’m honored that they trust me and that they’re learning to advocate for themselves and express themselves. I share my lunch with them, and walk with them to the Queer Resource Center or the Student Pantry when they are too shy or nervous to go by themselves, and I call the counseling office for them, and I invite them to do homework next to me in my cubicle if they don’t have somewhere quiet to study. And sometimes I get to watch them grow. Sometimes they get a scholarship to a university and reach out to me when they need a recommendation letter for graduate school. Sometimes they email me to let me know what programs they got into. Sometimes we stay in touch after they graduate and I read the writing they want to submit for publication. But sometimes they stop coming to class. They stop answering emails. They just disappear. Sometimes they never turn in a single assignment and I only hear from them on the last day of class, asking in delusional desperation if it’s possible to do all the work for the entire term in the next 24 hours so they don’t fail and lose their financial aid. 

So you can see how sometimes it feels like this is my primary job: the interlocutor, the caretaker. But it’s not. I still have 50-75 essays to grade, 2-3 classes to prep and teach, dozens of emails to answer. Sometimes I am having these conversations in the hallway on my way to another class, wondering if I will have time to pee while also wondering if I am a mandatory reporter for something this student is telling me, or if they are a suicide risk and I’ll need to submit a report after class. 

We go into teaching wanting to offer something to these students. Something bigger than all of it, something that transcends the bullshit. Literature, art, the ability to exercise and form your own thoughts, the seeds of rebellion and creativity and autonomy that start from within. This is the dream of all my friends who are educators. Despite the trope of the naive new teacher, we are not naive going into it. We know things will be hard. But we also know what radicalized us. We know what gave us an escape. We know that our minds are the only thing they can’t take from us, and we want to impress this upon the next generation. But every day we have to cry some. Because this shit is hard, and we know it will never get easier, just more familiar. 

And all of this is why it’s hard for me to say breezily that I looove teaching. I do love it at times. It demands all of me, and it gives me many beautiful and meaningful things in return. But it also exhausts me, and frightens me, and leaves me needing to come up for air every ten weeks, my neck aching with the weight of it all.