Why haven't you walked away from teaching yet?

I keep a letter from one of my professors of education. The word "letter" is kind of a stretch. Sure, it's written to me, but it's more a stream-of-consciousness observation on my first official foray into teaching. And, really, what that amounts to is a conglomeration of some good noticings, some questions, and some things I should have been doing better. After looking at this stream of thoughts and having them follow me around from new room to new room for six years, I have basically memorized these thoughts completely.

There's a question in there that says: "Josh! Where did you go? You did not smile..."

There's this thing - and I say thing because it isn't advice, really; it's more a fear-tactic or a superstition or an adage or a joke - that says: "Don't smile until December."

I have always thought that to be toxic, and I can say with confidence that all my fellow teaches have heard this thing when starting or going through their career.

None of the good ones, however, have followed it. Because, like, what the fuck?

Lately, I'm not smiling a lot anymore when I teach.

And I sit here quietly asking: "Josh! Where did you go?"

Sure, teaching is hard. And any teacher right now will say it's harder than ever; the past few years have done an incredible job of finding a way to disconnect the best and most passionate teachers in the profession and of creating canyons from the cracks already evident in the profession.

In a lot of ways, I have disconnected as well.

Where did I go? I'm not smiling; I get up in front of the class, beg them to be quiet so I can drag them towards some sense of meaning and purpose in what we are thinking about. And I realize, suddenly, that I am not the same teacher that I know I can be or that I have been in the past; I am falling back into the scared, unsure, distant, overburdened student teacher I was when my professor wrote that note that is supposed to remind me of how far I have come from beginning my career.

And I will spend 8 dollars on a coffee in the morning - far more often than I should. (They've memorized my order now...)

And I will find snacks upon snacks upon snacks to fill what has aptly been named my "Depression Jar." (And, well, some students have taken to making a Depression Jar of their own. Success?)

And I will do yoga and exercise. Every. Single. Day.

And I will embrace my hobbies (when I have the time).

"sElF-cARe."

After all that, if I still wake up not wanting to come into work, not wanting to interact with the people I work with, not wanting to spend another day in a position that I find slowly grating away at my ability to be successful in this profession, not wanting to be a teacher anymore, not wanting to spend money because of the risk of getting the infamous "US Bank Alert - Low balance in your account" every month, what then?

"Find the joy," they say.

What does bring me joy?

Watching my Speech and Debate Team dominate in competitions and working harder and harder every day to be better.
Watching that very same team crumble in defeat and choking down tears just to rise up again anyway.
Being the space that a student will come to when he's having a rough day dealing with all the daily pressures of just being a person.
Sitting at lunch in my tiny little office with a small but elite squad of 8th graders.
Looking at my white board full of out-of-context quotations I have said in the midst of making a yearbook this year.
Bearing witness to a student becoming a teacher in his own right in his life outside of these hallways.

I guess that's where I stop. Not because that's where the joy definitively stops, but because this is the exact list of reasons why I haven't walked away from teaching in its entirety. Right now, these six things are the reason I'm still around teaching. I think of these things a lot - grasping to them as the only thing keeping me afloat.

And it kind of pains me to say that the list stops there; there's not much else that's worth sticking around for.

What's wrong with that?

That's the conversation that's been opened in these recent years for teachers: not why do you teach, but why haven't you walked away from it?

Why are you still around? Why haven't you quit yet?

And there's a teacher shortage on which teachers can actually answer this question.

So we quit. Who can blame them?