I would not hesitate to teach these kids

My supervisor, a man with whom I have worked for over a decade, takes me aside before my college class and says he interviewed for a job at Home Office, an hour away. He cannot imagine he would not get it. The position would be a promotion to do curriculum development for social studies for all juvenile detention facilities in the state. A former coworker sent me this job listing weeks ago, but I balked more at the travel than the responsibilities. Given that I spend forty hours a week merrily locked in a building with adolescent murderers, I can adapt to most situations.

My supervisor tells me this news not merely because it would change our professional relationship and he would like my congratulations—which he, of course, has—but because he suggests I become the new head of college at the facility. With all due respect, there is no better person to approach with this, in no small part because he and I are the only adjuncts at the facility. There is no one else to ask.

It would mean I could slink away from being a mediocre science teacher--which might still be a generous description. I have long ceded my curriculum creation to the one certified science teacher who knows better what the students should be learning. As the facility shifts our students around units daily, it only makes sense to use the binders she makes up. When they move, their work can easily be swapped with their new teacher for consistency. Though I spent years doing science for half the day, it was in a nonsecure facility where I could do actual experiments with the ten kids in the building. When those students left, it was to go home, where their home districts could not care less what the prison teachers had been doing with them.

I tend toward a low-energy state at work. I know teachers who rage, who get compliance through write-ups and threats. I do not. I ask the students to do their work and attend. I offer my help. I may speak to someone intelligent and unmotivated. I do not see the point in screaming, and most of my students do the work, so why not employ watered-down Taoism?

I would get used to being the head of college at my facility. It would look good on my resume, and I am more useful in teaching college English. I would not savor the additional and unpaid responsibility, however. Still, I tend toward being helpful when presented with the opportunity. Otherwise, much of what I do during the day fits better under "Well, what can one expect from a state employee?" more than "What an industrious and dynamic teacher!" no matter my intentions.

Yet, I do not see myself developing curricula, except it would appeal to my almost pathological keenness for research and creating things.

I have of late wondered about being a teacher. It has been almost two decades since I received my master's degree in adolescent education. My graduate school lied to us, telling students they all but guaranteed placements and would help us until we had our own classrooms. A dual mathematics/special education graduate might write their own ticket. Everyone else should have hoped they had connections or practical undergraduate degrees since they will not be teachers.

I suffered because of becoming a teacher. I do not mean this in some sympathetic, noble way because of the trauma of my students affecting and how I made myself their Great White Savior, the sort inspirational movies feature who go into the poor house to teach ethnic minorities that Shakespeare was the real G. I did not go into debt to buy their pencils and notebooks but because there was no school willing to pay me and no job outside that field (aside from a ten-month stint at an educational publisher) who saw much use for a failed teacher. They would not employ me because, respectively: My mother worked there and annoyed them, I was the wrong gender, I was the wrong age, I was the wrong race, and I had a master's degree that would require them to pay me accordingly. The best my graduate school could recommend was stripping their name and degree from my resume so people might think I was less qualified, which did seem both disingenuous and a waste of the twenty years I spent paying off that debt.

When I could get a job, it was at a boarding school that stuffed me into a closet apartment (not much of an exaggeration as I doubt it was three hundred feet) and immediately cut my salary by $2000 and increased my hours by at least 50%, making clear I was always on call. They knew they had trapped me and then treated me as though I were indentured. Factoring all this in, I made less than minimum wage.

I thought substitute teaching was the only way to get my foot in the door, which contributed to a diagnosable anxiety disorder -- or would have if I could have even dreamed of having health insurance and could afford to take a day off to see a doctor. I once got strep throat and bronchitis simultaneously. My face swelled until I could neither speak nor swallow. If I were permitted to teach, I would have seen a doctor and been treated with a Z-pack within an hour--which I resigned myself to at an urgent care on the third day, costing me hundreds of dollars I did not have. I returned to subbing the next day, exhausted and still disfigured. The students only behaved because I looked infectious. It was that or starving that month.

Even when I got a real teaching job, it was at a nonsecure juvenile detention facility, not some liberal private school with benefits. It was a steady paycheck with which I could begin building a life with Amber. It was beneath my skills, but I did all I could to excel because that's what one does: bloom where one is planted.

Then, the governor closed my facility to score political points he could not spend before he was evicted from office for hiding the COVID-19 deaths of the elderly. The children who would be served at my facility--and we did help them--were left hanging in the winds, either consigned to higher security facilities despite judicial edicts or sent to private community placements that cared only for the new infusion of state money. (It was not cheaper to have the residents in these placements. The taxpayers still footed the bill and the upkeep on now empty buildings.)

I transferred to the highest security facility, where, owing to years of state mismanagement or poor staffing, education is often notional or absent. This panicked me the first few days since I expected to teach and couldn't.

Covid is partly why I would not want to be at another school, though. So much education was shattered during the lockdowns. It might take years before anything can feel normal, and those are years of miserable and unprepared students lost (those who were already well-off and fostered leaped ahead, of course). Now, any student can have essays generated by AI. Why would I want to grade computerized plagiarism? Why would I want to spend unpaid hours indentured again?

The job at Home Office is always around the corner, the subjective tense of it, knowing I chose a different pain. If I applied to this job, I would not have to deal with dysregulated boys who find little value in education and who will only see a world outside the razor wire once they are older than I am now. I would have colleagues who, if they do not enjoy their jobs, at least dislike them differently.

My saving grace is that I see myself as a writer who teaches, not a teacher who writes. Writing is the Alpha and Omega. Any work I do will be in service of that. I don't know what else I could do for forty hours a week, only that it needs to support my life while not eating up too much of it and give me a way to feel successful. The latter may be unnecessary.

I don't remember when I stopped saying I was inferior as an author. I know it has been years, though there was no sharp turning point or epiphany. It was a gentle change away from false modesty so the other party would say, "Oh, that isn't true! Your work is marvelous, and please allow me to enumerate how." They rarely do, and why should they? Who would waste their time if you espouse disrespect for your work? The artist must be their own advocate.

I will not talk down my work beyond acknowledging I would have changed a few things originally. The slow reissue of the ***Night's Dream series has allowed me to do just that, though I may not take the scissors to my other books. I have a list of eleven unfinished novels. However, some are unfinished in the way that they could be shelf-ready with the application of a cover. Others are as long as I could make a story for fun in two days.

I do not have time to feel inferior. I have too much to finish and have received too much specific praise to believe I am the victim of a conspiracy to make me feel good about myself.

Without my writing, my identity is incidental. All roads are drawn in ink and lead to my bibliography. I have carved myself out in the singular devotion of my nurtured gift, hoping to contain a few more paragraphs.

My students sometimes wish to get a rise from me by saying I am not a good teacher (though I am exceptional when given cause). I laugh at them because their barbs fall well short of their target. I am a writer, not an Earth Science teacher. You might as well insult me for being a poor example of an elephant.

(When they do try to insult my writing, I always point out that they've never read me--and they haven't. The lack of racism, pornography, and glorified gang violence puts them off.)

My ego is gratified by my work and my ability despite the lack of reception. For a paycheck, I've written things of which I am not particularly proud--I don't reread those, so I do not know what editors did to them. I have written 7000-word paeans to a Bigfoot talk I attended, which will be read by fewer people than were in the audience that day. It almost does not matter that I am little read. I am honest and prolific.

last watched: Loudermilk
reading: The Illuminatus! Trilogy