Mental-Health Timeline of A First-Year Teacher

The Practical Side: How it Happens (Or, where’s that light again?)

I promised you a light, now, can we get overnight shipping on that?
(in all seriousness, consider investing in some kind of light therapy. My roommate came home with a lamp one of the many Sunday evenings on which I was feeling too overwhelmed to do anything at all. I immediately hijacked the lamp, took off the shade, and left it blazing in the middle of my floor -- along with my own desk lamp, the overhead light, and a halogen lamp – for the remainder of the evening and the larger part of the next two weeks)

So how, in six or eight months’ time, do you get through the “hardest year of your professional life” and manage to come out clean, and why can’t we just tell you all our secrets so you don’t have to be painfully, heartbreakingly miserable for a good number of those months?

No idea.
RJ told me that by the Spring I wouldn’t want to take days off. I thought he was crazy. (he is). But the week before state testing, there was a tournament in Huntsville I wanted to compete in. I would have to take Friday off school to make it there in time, and I thought “well, I really need that time at school … I’d rather be with my kids.”
IT HAPPENED.

Here’s how it happened for me:

First Nine Weeks:
Running on adrenaline; still think the hardest thing I’m going to have to do is plan stimulating lessons for various evaluations

Labor Day is the last time I remember caring and/or having the energy to effectively influence a) what I was wearing OR b) my physical surroundings (apartment, classroom, car, etc)

The phrase: “we are living in squalor” became a convenient expression of our communal state of mind

Second Nine Weeks:
Surprisingly healthy and happy for the first half, I fell fast towards the middle of that deep dark pool around November. Check-mark grading became a must (hats off to RJ). Days off were necessary not for relaxation but in order to get the absolutely critically necessary work done. Managed to grade NOTHING for each half of the term until reports were due.

Deeply felt the inarguable truth of MD’s crushing statement: The hardest thing you will have to do is get out of bed every morning.

Christmas break:
Ignored school, ignored my grades, cried for two days before I had to come back. Spent the first week of third nine weeks grading and avoiding the office until I finally got it together. Vowed to be more organized/on top of my stuff third nine weeks.

Third Nine Weeks:
WORLDS BETTER. Tons of stress, but somehow manageable.
Fly in the ointment: Oxford five out of eight weekends

Fourth Nine Weeks:
Worlds better again.

I don’t know what these magical changes are that happen. It’s not easy, I’m not on top of my game, but I’m not out of my mind anymore either.

Things do change.

Pandora’s Box (advice to first-years / first year reflection)

According to Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, Pandora lifted the lid of her infamous box “and out flew plagues innumerable, sorrow and mischief for mankind … One good thing, however, was there – Hope”

Be that as it may, I doubt hope was the first thing early man noticed as he was engulfed by the plagues, sorrows, and, perhaps more aptly in this case, plain old mischief released from the box. So it goes with teaching.

Later, talking about Norse mythology, Hamilton allows that “even these sternly hopeless Norsemen, whose daily life in their icy land through the black winters was a perpetual challenge, saw a far-away light break through the darkness”

Wherever the light is your first semester of teaching, it’s almost too far away to matter. And although we’re not in the blackest of black winters, I’ve heard descriptions equally disheartening and hardly less poetic of the first term teaching. A second-year’s droll prediction of how life would look roundabout the middle of my first semester:
“It’s like being in the middle of a deep, dark pool when you are too far away to reach either shore and too tired to swim”

Sad but true.

The only thing that any of us can tell you (and we will …) is that it does get better.

HJ told us at the Christmas dinner that his first year teaching was the longest year of his life … but that the second year flew by.

RJ insisted that I take days off the first term, while insisting equally that by 4th quarter I wouldn’t even want them anymore.

Ben will tell you a hundred times that no one has ever found the second year to be harder than the first.

And my entire “team” this summer was convinced that by the third year, you’ll really have the hang of it.

So sometime next October (don’t believe everything Ben tells you, by the way, I made it through October with my sanity and managed to stave off the breakdown until mid-December, which when it came was no less traumatizing for the wait) … or December, or February, in the long haul when some person apparently even less competent than yourself decides to have you drive to Oxford for five CONSECUTIVE weekends … remember that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, that somehow, inexplicably, it WILL and DOES get better. Timing of this post could have been much more appropriate, no doubt, but I’m at the point where I am beginning to see the light break, and not just because it’s May.

Andy Dufraine, according to the Shawshank Redemption, crawled through a river of sh*t came out clean on the other side.

It happens.

You can, and you will.

ENJOY whatever you’re doing until you get here, take as much as you can from this summer (and DON’T let it stress you out!!), and remember sometime in the fall that along with the mischief of all mankind you will inevitably find hope. Far away, there is a light.