It's now been over a year since I left my teaching position of eighteen years at Hughes Academy, and while I've always had a nostalgic tendency in my thinking, I think very little about it and miss it (almost) not at all. The stress-inducing busy-work that the district required killed any lingering positive feelings I had, and by the time I left, I was ready to put it all behind me.
But it's not quite true that I don't miss it. I recall the joy I got teaching English I Honors and how effectively (and notoriously) rigorous I was with those students. Yet I remember how much time I spent evenings and weekends assessing work for that class, and my slight nostalgia diminishes further.
I think of all the at-risk kids I worked with, students who needed instruction in so many basic areas of executive functioning before I could even begin working on their reading or writing. With such students, the metric for success is more likely something as simple as staying on task for ten minutes or curbing an impulse for attention than the effective presentation of a counterclaim or the determination of a paragraph's organizational principle. I don't have any students like that anymore, students who are severely lacking in basic social skills, impulse control, self-awareness, and general mental health, students who come from fractured or completely broken homes, students who through neglect or the reality of being raised by a single parent have raised themselves, often on the streets.
Those students were incredibly exhausting but simultaneously rewarding. Still, having four or five such students in a single class could render any instructional period with them virtually useless. So I miss those kids, but I don't miss having a handful of them in a single class making it nearly impossible for others to learn; I miss those students, but I don't miss the frustration and heartache that often accompanied them.
And what have a gained in return? Students who are, if not eager, at least willing to learn. Students who stay on task. Students who respond respectfully when redirected. Students who come from home environments that prepared them for school. It is so much less stressful. And while I do feel some twinge of guilt occasionally about leaving a place where I know I was helping kids who might otherwise fall through the many fractures of our system, I keep in mind two things: one, having spent eighteen years working there, I put my time in with those students. And two, helping kids is helping kids, no matter who the kids are.