Remember when I didn’t think I’d ever cut it as a teacher? I miss those days.

I probably haven’t mentioned it here, but this whole student teaching/becoming a real, live, grown-up high school English teacher isn’t turning out to be my cup of tea. Part of it stems from the fact that I’ve spent the past four, no, five years not knowing what the heck I was doing, making it up as I went, and doing my very own thing in my very own classroom. Sure, at the beginning I was scared out of my mind and wished upon every single star in the sky someone would tell me what I should (or, in my case, shouldn’t) be doing. I complained about the system and about the emphasis placed on college writing teachers to “change the world, one freshman at a time,” and I swore up and down freshmen composition courses that are left to the whims and whiles of the instructors aren’t really doing what freshmen composition courses are supposed to be doing: preparing students for four years of writing on the college level. I wanted to teach writing, to invite my students into discussions that challenged them by reading things that challenged them, and to get them to put themselves on paper, whether it was in a research paper about the use of steroids in baseball or in a personal essay about the experience of coming out. Sometimes what I wanted to happen in the classroom, what I planned and prepared and dreamed about, failed miserably. Sometimes the thing I figured out thirty seconds before I left the office (usually thanks to My Person™ telling me what she had done in her class, until she moved away and I had to ask Mitch, which wasn’t nearly as helpful or successful or even useful) went brilliantly. I often referred to myself as The Worst Teacher Ever™, but I didn’t often hate it. Rarely did I wish for different students (though I did spend a good part of my first year in the M.A. program wishing for a different book to teach from), and as much as grading papers sucks, there was something immensely satisfying about it.

Those days are gone.

I’m under the instruction and supervision of a mentor teacher and university supervisor. My university supervisor doesn’t really have any doubts about my teaching ability, and except for coming to Jesus every once in a while, she’s rather enjoyable. My mentor teacher isn’t the mentor teacher I feared. She hasn’t asked for formal, eight part lesson plans with stated objectives and the corresponding state standards done up in triplicate and submitted a week in advance, although that sort of behavior might have me just expire on the spot. She hasn’t told me I need to lose fifty pounds (I know that was an unreasonable fear, but I do need to lose fifty pounds, and I have this secret wish I’ll finally find someone to actually acknowledge this to my face) or dress better. Instead she’s scattered (I can’t find her desk for all the papers and folders and books and whatnot on top of it) and non-committal. She can’t provide me with reading schedules or lesson plans from her previous experiences teaching this course, and most of my “What have you done in the past with [insert piece of literature here]?” is met with “Um. Well, What would you do?” Whether it’s just her face or her demeanor or the fact she’s really too scattered to follow my line of thinking, those pop quizzes rarely end well for me. Instead my ideas, thrown out off the top of my head, are questioned further, critiqued, and handed back to me sliced, diced, and over salted. I know better than to walk into a classroom full of high school seniors completely unprepared, and I know that no matter how clear something is or how specific the requirements, there will be kids who need their hand held. Despite my experience, or, rather, because of it, I don’t have a bag of tricks to whip out when I come to a some new material. I believe that on some level, you just have to sit them down and make them talk about it, and sometimes you need to sit them down and make them write about it. There isn’t a reading guide for every book/story/poem/novel/play. There probably won’t be any at all in college. Not every single assignment has a rubric or a right answer. I can’t tell a student what to do if they don’t have ideas of their own. Teaching students to ask homogeneous questions, like the ones on study guides or graciously tucked in the margins of their text book in blue ink so they stand out, isn’t teaching them to think. It’s teaching them that there are right ways and wrong ways to look at a text or a movie or life, and that there are answers.

There aren’t always answers. Everything isn’t black and white. Reading and writing is about a whole hell of a lot more than comprehension.

I feel trapped. All the things I believe about writing and critical thinking, pedagogical things if you want to be all higher education about it, don’t seem to have a place in high school English language arts. I want to know what’s important to my students, what moves them, what they want to know about. I want to peak their interest, not by showing Batman Begins, but by getting them to think and feel and discuss texts that, even if they don’t realize it initially, are important to them. I want them to write, pages and pages and pages of writing, about themselves and the weather and their family and that asshole who won’t return their calls and what they’re reading and what they saw on TV last night and how they feel about what’s going on in the world and everything else. I want them to run out of letters they’ve written so much. I want ah-ha moments and complaints they’re being forced to do to much and failing grades and papers that have been revised ten times and finally get an “A.” I want them to know they can feel, that what they think and say is important, just as important as the Hebrews who wrote the Old Testament or whoever wrote the screenplay for Batman Begins.

The Goat suggested, if I decide to not be a teacher, that I could get a job at Ikea. Some people might say that I have a passion, and chucking it in the nearest recycle bin and going to work selling Swedish modular furniture would be a waste. I’m not sure that’s true, not only because Swedish modular funiture is amazing, but because it’s more than a little bit difficult to see what you want to do but not be able to do it because it’s just beyond the scope of what you’re supposed to do. This is why I stopped writing. I couldn’t stand working and feeling like I was supposed to say something, reach someone, when the opportunity to do that had passed me by, gotten just beyond my reach.

What would you do if you were me?