Quittin' time

October 7, 2009
I knew I had to quit when I literally pulled my hair out. Recently some friends and I have discussed, sometimes after a few glasses of red wine, the misuse of the word “literally”, often by those younger, and therefore dumber than us, but also by such beloved figures as our own parents. We scoff at each other’s tales of how Mom said her mouth was “literally on fire” after eating the chili, or how the TV announcer claimed that his jaw was “literally on the floor” when he heard the news. These statements conjure up images of cartoon characters dousing oral flames or scooping the wayward body part up and dusting it off, images which are amusing to us learned folk.
All this is to say that I know what the word literally means, and that this was not a metaphoric hair-pulling experience. As I stood over the garbage can in my classroom holding a clump of my hair, I knew that I could not live like this. I also had the passing thought that my hair looked worse than I had pictured it in my mind, sort of a fuzzy brown nest, and that I better throw it out before anyone saw how gross it looked.
The first time I quit a teaching job partway through the year, it took three months for me to make the decision. This time, it took less than half an hour. It took the amount of time between my somewhat surprised revelation that yes, that is my hair that I am holding in my fist, and the arrival of the Spanish teacher, whose rolling blue cart has never been a more welcome sight.


When I graduated from college in the Spring of 2009, I was quite proud of myself. I had survived student teaching with only a few battle scars, even enjoying myself at times. My first placement had been in a solidly middle-class school a few blocks from my house. I skated through, enjoying the company of my cooperating teacher and our daily Diet Coke break, basking in the glow of her explicit compliments: “You’re more of a co-teacher than a student teacher”, and her implicit ones: “Yes, that last student teacher, well, she just wasn’t cut out for the job. Teaching isn’t for everyone.” Clearly, though, we were two of the chosen few.
My second placement had been a bit rockier, with a slightly rowdier band of children, the constant threat of a head lice outbreak and, in one case, a student lifting his desk over his head (“I just wanted to move it. So I had to dump all my stuff out first”). Still, I attributed any difficulties I had to the fact that my cooperating teacher’s behavior management system consisted of short bouts of yelling interspersed with long lectures about what it means to be a good child. Surely, I thought, if I had had this class from the beginning, they would have been attuned to my kinder, gentler, though still sufficiently firm, ways. Just because I wasn’t as strict as Mrs. Wahlfeldt, it didn’t mean I couldn’t control a classroom. My own classroom. Just not this classroom.
My self-satisfaction increased with every box and lamp my boyfriend and I loaded into his minivan. We were hitting the road, leaving the state, heading for the big city. There would be no return to the Chicago suburbs for me, back to a school like the one I came from, where the children were white and each carefully packed lunchbox contained a sandwich, a bag of chips and an apple, with an icepack to keep the carrot sticks at an optimal temperature. No, I had secured a job at Moten Elementary School, a 4th through 6th grade monstrosity atop a hill in Southeast DC. I was impressed by the principal at a job fair I had attended in March, and apparently I had impressed her as well. I soon wondered if it was my ignorance that impressed her most of all.