Changes

Teaching has changed me.

I don't just mean in this socially conscious way. Going in front of a room full of students from some of the worst backgrounds in America makes you think and act differently.

Teaching has such a huge impact on you as person because the job is seemingly never-ending. It is in many ways a social position. I am a teacher at school. I am a teacher at home grading. I am a teacher at the grocery store where students work. I am a teacher when running and I get stopped by students. I am a teacher when parents call me when I am trying to cook dinner. I am a teacher every moment. I am thinking about teaching, planning to teach, reflecting on what I taught, or being reminded that I teach all the time. It sometimes gets to the point where I have to restrain myself from disciplining random teenagers I see at the store or the mall for having cell phones or talking too loudly.

Because of this intermingling of the job and your personhood, the issues of students become those of your own. Poverty goes from being this distant thing to close event as you witness it through the lives of students. After a while I got a little hardened to the little tragedies of everyday life. If I didn't get the slightest bit callous to their condition, I would have allowed them to use poverty as an excuse to fail. Everything they do, from the food they eat to the clothes on their back to the decisions that they make, is informed by that cycle of poverty.

One of the most striking aspects of teaching is the impact it has had on my personality. The big change is the decline of the "nice guy" persona. I am not afraid to say "no to anyone if I am confident in my decision. That has led to a more productively (for the most part) confrontational attitude.

I don't take nearly as much crap from people as I did in August. The aspect that fueled this change is the fact that students and administrators perceive niceness as weakness. Don't even get me started on how foreign and idiotic that is to me. Niceness was the key difficulty I had in dealing with people. I had to kill that perception by being consistently vigilant in my views (and smiling while doing it). Late work is late work. Bad work is bad work. Dumb policy is dumb policy. If it served a productive purpose to say the truth (often not the case with my administration), I started saying it.

I find myself becoming far more confident of myself as a person. I don't care if my belt is out of a loop or if I speak oddly. I have been tested as a person for so long by so many people that I no longer cared what they thought about me. I know who I am.

Teaching is the hardest job I could imagine having. It has cost me time, energy, and mental stability. It probably has taken a little time off my life. It also offers a few moments of immense rewards. If it doesn't change you, there is a problem. Hopefully you change for the better.