Writer first. Teacher... eighteenth.

My coworker looks harried, saying that she isn't sure how much longer she can keep working under these conditions or, more to the point, not working under them. The quality and quantity of daily instruction at this high-security facility are so low that she, a consummate educator, feels frustrated and ineffectual. She did not spend so long in college to sit around, doing nothing. She wastes away when a unit is down for searches or quarantine or when her co-teacher has no interest in teaching that day.

I look awkwardly at her and note that I am 30K words into my NaNoWriMo project. I assume that the days of canceled periods and not much to do will ebb soon, though they have not since I've begun here. (The facility negotiated that they would give the guards double time and a half for overtime until January 1st, resulting in a flurry of people who had been on workman's comp or our sick to recover their health. This lasted for a few weeks, but we now find ourselves without enough coverage to hold classes some days.) There is no real shame in keeping myself productive, even if I run out of lesson planning and grading within an hour with seven left to the day.

My coworker's feelings are valid. I understand how difficult this must be for her. I see it as a matter of my definition. I teach but, if cornered at a party, I will bring up my writing first -- and may consciously find another topic of conversation before hitting upon "Oh, I also teach high security adjudicated minors, but that's not that interesting..." She sees a day wasted around defeated and ineffective people (not all the teachers but a few and conspicuously). I see hours that I can put toward my practice, completing one project or other. As other teachers spend their time researching the best trucks on the market and falling deeper into QAnon anti-vax conspiracies, I feel no guilt in writing.

I can't tell her that it will get better for her, though I hope and see ways that might. When we leave the building each day, we pass a poster reading "Change Is Constant" in dozens of typefaces. It is one of the ways where I can, in good conscience, keep working in a system that I loudly acknowledge is not effective. Every day, I walk in and wait to learn the daily dysfunction. Will there be no teachers allowed on the units to teach? Will there be no classes for the first two periods because the staff just did not come? Was there a fight that meant these students won't be together or even be permitted to leave their units? Will I find out that twenty students were shipped to the Department of Corrections to help us keep the facility under control? I don't know, and I radically accept what I am told because I can work in this paradigm. I am an author first. When teaching isn't going well, I default to being an author. I see this not as a catastrophe but an opportunity to deepen my canon. My coworker has no reason. She is a teacher more than I am, and I honor that.

If I didn't have my girls to teach, if someone were intent to micromanage me rather than leave me to my own devices, I would not be able to take so relaxed a view. Should all my girls vanish -- and given that some have sentences that stretch to a decade, it is unlikely to happen any time soon -- or should someone decide to account for my spare minutes, I would rapidly lose what contentment I have.

People talk daily of their retirements, their growing and shrinking investments, and otherwise plotting when they will be done with this system forever. While some can count the months until this is true, others count decades. Will I retire from this facility? I have twenty-five years before I can answer that question. Some coworkers are looking only to a door, retirement, and the peace of death shortly after. I have a better sort of apathy, one not so entrenched in utter fatalism. Have I ever been in a place with so many so defeated, so many just waiting to be anywhere else? If so, I was too blithe to notice. Looking only toward the door is a cliche about workplaces, but teaching -- or whatever this is -- is so much a human services position. This is not cataloging identical widgets but trying in some fractional way to change the lives of these residents, both for themselves and for the world into which they may one day be released. (Some small fraction of the boys will not see the world again, facing potential life sentences for multiple murders, but that is only the case for one or two of them out of seventy.)

I do comprehend the situation. The system is broken and apathetic. The residents are often poor vessels for hope. I could be defeated, but I would rather quit than succumb. My colleagues thought the same at some point and, after a night of the soul, gave up and considered every day only one closer to retirement.

As yet, I cannot relate to their attitude. I do know their antecedents; I am not that oblivious. I see my surroundings.

My only direct sunlight daily is around forty minutes on my way to and during an English class I coteach. The rest of the time, the windows are too high, on the wrong side of the building, or do not exist. I cannot very well loll in a patch of sunshine like an overfed cat, so I find excuses for it to brush my masked cheeks or fall upon the back of my head, neither of which can last more than a moment without becoming conspicuous.

I mark time by a skeleton watch, but I feel no actual passage of time. Without being able to see the world outside, it fades. If I were one of my students, I would do nothing but stare outside my window at the grass and birds before they recede for the winter. The windows in their rooms are frosted to prevent them from throwing gang signs at kids in the yard, so they see nothing but a suffused white glow. One tries to finagle more melatonin from the doctor, who jokingly accuses that the boy wants to spend his sentence unconscious. The impudent boy spits that this is precisely what he wants, though it would be the sleep of a decade.

I follow a schedule that pretends to be concrete, but it is scribbled red pen on a photocopy. Behind it is the previous one set in stone that came out days before. My red pen schedule waits to be overridden by the one that will come next week. As this one had me in potentially four separate places during the same period -- quarantine unit one, intake/overflow unit two, seclusion unit eleven, and an English class on the girls' wing -- it is a flawed instrument from the outset.

I have only one class that I consider mine, teaching Living Environment to a brilliant boy. There are two girls there with him, but one does college geology on the computer, and the other furrows wrinkles in her brow puzzling through a TASC prep book; neither of them needs my teaching. Otherwise, I am trying to get boys on the unit alone to do packet work or co-teaching with someone who had the class first, so I follow their lead. Or, more bluntly, I feel necessary at this facility for around forty minutes a day, not counting prepping and grading for my solitary boy, and am otherwise just following a schedule. I enjoy some of my students (both girls, my Living Environment student, and a few boys), but most do not need me present. I could just as well be a cardboard cut-out with some papers taped to its hand, and I am unsure about the papers. But, again, I am not too bothered. Though I make less than my brothers (my older, less educated, my young overeducated, both intelligent and accomplished in their fields), I make more than enough to support my household, easily triple some of my previous jobs. I am comfortable and might not be working some job outside my degree field, however little this job sometimes feels as though it is in education.

The building is segregated into three main sections with smaller sections from there. Each of these sections and these classrooms has not a lock for my keyring but a button to press for someone in the central unit to buzz open. I still find myself reaching for my keys when I approach one of these, the etiquette of it strange yet necessary. Sometimes, the box on the wall buzzes and asks for my ID, as though I could somehow have gotten inside without their notice. I could say anything, and they would still buzz me through, but they are following a script. They can see me on the cameras and know at the very least that I am a teacher.

Only the girls' wing feels like a school as it is the only place students move for school. Aside from culinary and such electives, the boys are educated on their wings in a segregated classroom space that seems to be used as an improvised movie theater whenever teachers are not present there. (That this is not true for every unit is more a testament to the lack of appropriate technology instead of the academic aptitude of the residents.) Given the length of some of their sentences, around half of the boys on the unit are in the college program -- whether they deserve to be or not -- or have at least completed compulsory schooling. Those residents sit in the dayroom, playing cards or watching television until something happens that interests them more. I do not bother learning most of their names, as they do not introduce themselves to me, and I do not need to educate them. (Next semester, I may be a community college adjunct in the facility, and I will teach some of them English 101, but I am so used to the fickleness of the schedule that I will not believe this will happen until it does.)

At 10 am, I eat lunch in the windowless teachers' room in the center of the building. I do not strictly need to, except that it was my only reasonable free period in the first iteration of the schedule. There is a more reasonable period for me now at 11:30, but I have acclimated to this one. Also, many of the teachers slaver for free school lunches/prison food that the cafeteria will provide them in polystyrene foam clamshells around 11:30. These lunches at almost universally gastronomic mistakes, evoking precisely the picture one would expect from the above descriptor, and the teachers complain loudly about the fare they are handed. I bring my lunch, leftovers from the previous night's dinner, and do not have to complain about what I eat. (When the lunch is miraculously good, the six or seven clamshells are pounced upon and devoured, leaving at least five hungry teachers to pout at the rank misfortune.)

I have a good relationship with most teachers and staff, though we do not necessarily agree pedagogically or socially (see also: QAnon anti-vaxxers). My default is to be tongue in cheek and personable, and my girls (and trans boy) are doing well, which always cheers me. After a few weeks, I learned most of their names and grasped the office politics of who is not to be mentioned to whom and what subjects are verboten. I found the rhythm and can move around, especially once I accepted that no one necessarily cares what I do as long as I am in the right place at the right time and sign the books. (Each unit has a book, usually toted around by a YDA, who inscribes something in it every few minutes. It seems tedious, but we adjust to our daily tedium.)

last watched: Inside Job
reading: Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas