Your the Best: How a Good Teacher Failed

Say what you will about my teaching career, but leave this standing: I was the best. Adhering to standards? Running a classroom like my literacy coach wanted? Delivering lesson plans on time? Absolutely not. Ensuring that my students followed protocol when it came to anything and everything, like leaving for the bathroom? Please. Where I WAS the best, and where my success will always let me sleep at night - or during the day, since I’m working nights now - is that any child in my classroom felt safe with me. Did I do it like you* wanted? Clearly not. But did I do it RIGHT? For me, yes.

In going through - painfully, slowly, the detritus from my classroom - I found so many notes. Letters. Cartoons. Drawings. Oddly shaped clay sculptures. Stuffed animals. But the notes; most of them proclaiming me the best teacher ever. Almost all of them using “your”, not “you’re”. Now that’s something that should have been taught years ago, of course, and god forbid we release a child into the wild wild world not knowing how to properly use contractions - but here's where I suppose I confess to being a teacher who wasn't meeting expectations. If a child was happy - feeling safe - feeling loved - feeling fully accepted, then I spent the last four years doing God's work. Who the fuck cares about anaphora, anyway?

* I'll wait until everyone I love is fully out of the system, and then I'm naming names. I asked you to tell me why I was cut loose, and you gave me crickets. This isn't over.