Teaching in Context
BY AMY ESTES
Tyler James Bangkok, Box Inside Box Inside Boxes, used and found boxes, acrylic, photograph, dimensions variable, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
TEACHING IN CONTEXT
AMY ESTES | FEB 2022 | ISSUE 13
It’s Friday at 4 p.m., and the after-work crowd begins taking seats at the bar and pushing tables together. Beers are ordered, shots are poured, glasses are clinked with cheers to the weekend. Slowly, the noise level creeps to a roar that forces everyone to yell, punctuated by the occasional high-pitched scream, clapping, and explosions of laughter. It’s early—the sun is still up, so there’s no cover for dirty deeds typically done in darkness.
In lieu of dresses or tight jeans and low-cut tops, the women wear t-shirts with brightly colored slogans: “KIND IS COOL” and “What we learn becomes part of who we are.” There are no high heels or flashy jewelry, only TOMS made from pencil-covered fabric and lanyards with dangling keys and school pride: “SIERRA ELEMENTARY—GO PANTHERS!” Under every chair is a huge bag, bursting with papers to be graded and a rainbow of Flair pens.
Gone are the gentle women who sing-song their way through carpet time and math stations—in their stead are screaming young women doing tequila shots. The patient middle school English teacher who, to her students, appears totally passionate about writing thesis statements and reading The Giver can be found outside chain smoking cigarettes and nursing her fifth beer while perusing Tinder. The slightly-dorky male history teacher and his rumpled khakis who normally wouldn’t get a second glance has become an object of desire as a harem of single female teachers surround him, hoping to be part of a teacher love story. Outside, in a dark juxtaposition, a woman in a “I teach kinder. What’s your superpower?” t-shirt vomits into a gutter.
“Mommy needs wine” culture is ubiquitous in our society—but no one is discussing teacher happy hours.
***
I started teaching when I was twenty-three and oblivious to what I was getting into. My first week of school, I was assigned a mentor teacher, and when I went to her in tears over a spat with a friend, she stood with her mouth agape and reminded me that the most important thing to do while you’re teaching is to “check your personal life at the door.”
Throughout my career, I’ve taught while my dad battled cancer, my grandparents were ill and two of them died, having found out that I was cheated on by my long-time partner, being broken up with, fighting a UTI, dealing with a kidney infection because I couldn’t leave my classroom to go to the bathroom during said UTI, fighting varied stomach bugs, having the flu, doubled over with cramps, bleeding through my pants during a heavy period, recovering six days after getting a hysterectomy, having strep throat, battling depression, having a panic attack, so heartbroken I can barely function, seething with anger, and in many other things I’m sure I’m forgetting (or choosing to forget).
I know that plenty of workers show up to work in these conditions. I know that for many, not going to work isn’t an option because they will lose their job or the wages needed to support their family because they have no paid time off. I know that relatively speaking, I am extraordinarily lucky to have the safety net, support, and freedom that comes from things like sick leave, tenure, days off, and a salaried job.
I’m also acutely aware that friends of mine with typical office jobs have the ability to shut the door and cry on bad days, the ability to put on headphones and work in silence, and the freedom to openly share things with their co-workers.
Teachers do not have this luxury. The expectation is that you hide it all from the children, put on a happy face, and do your job.
***
Every year, I am trained on how to handle a school shooter. One of the most important instructions is to remain calm while you draw the blinds and lock the doors. If I have to turn off the light and ask my students to get under their desks, I am supposed to give as little information as possible.
The kids should never know what is actually happening.
The kids always know what is actually happening.
If our nation has decided that our collective obsession with guns is worth endangering children and training them on what to do in that danger, then why is there an obsession with keeping the danger a secret?
Why are we so obsessed with hiding the truth from children?
***
I’ve wanted to be a teacher since I was a child, and in retrospect, teaching has been a perfect career for someone obsessed with hiding who they are. The list of all the things I’ve taught through was incomplete: I also taught through a secret for the first eight years of my career.
I’m gay.
I didn’t come out until I was thirty years old. After being raised in an evangelical Christian church and a conservative community, I knew better than to present my true self to the world. By the time I became a teacher, I was well-versed in pretending, so creating a persona where I was a lonely cat lady, or happily dating a straight man, or somewhere in between for most of my career was easy. I’d been hiding my whole life.
I still wrestle with whether teaching made me keep hiding, or whether I chose teaching because I could hide my true self. Or was it both/and?
***
It’s estimated that 76% of teachers are female. That number rises in elementary schools, and goes down just slightly in middle and high school. Teaching has always been a female-dominated profession, a fact that isn’t lost on me when it comes to thinking about hiding.
How much of our silencing of teachers is just another facet of silencing women?
***
During my first year of teaching, I was getting my credential simultaneously and classes began shortly after my school day ended, making happy hour an impossibility. Instead, I developed a solo Friday ritual: as soon as I was out of the county where I taught, I would roll down the windows, and turn on “Where Is My Mind?” by the Pixies at full volume.
I would light up one single Camel menthol cigarette, and scream-cry-pound the steering wheel-lose my mind for the duration of the cigarette before stubbing it out and returning to my “normal” drive.
Your head will collapse
But there's nothing in it
And you'll ask yourself
Where is my mind?
Where is my mind?
Where is my mind?
Way out in the water
See it swimming...
It was catharsis, but it wasn’t enough. I needed to blow off steam, but what I really needed was people who understood what I was going through. I needed my colleagues.
I needed to know I wasn’t alone.
There’s an unspoken rule that there are no photos taken at teacher happy hour, no invitation to others save for the occasional spouse, and that what happens at teacher happy hour stays there. This is in part because as much as we try to not talk about work, we always end up talking about work. And try as they might, non-teachers will never understand.
It’s also because as we talk, our real selves start to peek out around the edges, and to anyone who knows us as teachers, this feels dangerous. Teachers are expected to be chaste, family-friendly, cheerful robots all the time—we are often selective about who we reveal ourselves to.
In recent years, on Instagram, younger generations of teachers have been fighting this stigma and sharing photos of themselves in bikinis and shorts, reminding people that teachers have bodies, too, and that it’s okay for us to show them. They’re speaking out about not constantly working on their off-time, and posting photos of themselves enjoying their summer, including alcohol, cannabis, and parties. I cheer for them with likes and comments, but internally, I am terrified for them, and for the consequences they may face for simply living a life outside of school.
When I came out as queer at age thirty while teaching in the conservative community where I was raised, my principal at the time begged me not to “make it a thing” as if mentioning my partner or sharing that I was gay meant that I was going to be holding a “how-to” course at lunch.
The first time I came out to my colleagues, it was at a teacher happy hour. While my friends had been supportive and assumed it would be fine at work, my colleagues understood the risks, the silence, the oath we all take to close off any hint of our true selves. They knew why I had to be silent.
Of course, eventually, the jig was up. I was outed by a former student who saw a photo on my private Instagram account, and suddenly, this secret I’d worked so hard to keep was fodder for campus gossip. I received no support because “I shouldn’t have brought my personal life to work” and when I reminded them that someone else had brought it to work and my colleagues had contributed, I was told that I shouldn’t have shared about my life online, or with colleagues. In some schools, this wouldn’t have been a big deal, but in the small, conservative community I was teaching in, being gay was not an option.
The issue wasn’t the time and venue of my sharing, it was that I was sharing a part of my personal life that this school community didn’t think should exist at all. Rather than confront the rumors or defend myself, I simply left. I still had a job, but the message was clear: I could come to work, but I couldn’t bring myself.
I abandoned a school I loved, colleagues I adored, and students I cared for because the hatred and pressure was too much. My colleagues told my students that I was sick, but the rumors swirled in my absence. I never even got to say goodbye, or explain why I had to go. I’m not sorry I left, but I am haunted by what happened, and all the things I didn’t get to say live tightly in my chest, a permanent, unspoken heartbreak.
The kids should never know what is actually happening.
***
I teach English. Gone are the days of diagramming sentences and looking up vocabulary words in the dictionary. Research has shown that it’s best to teach things in context—alongside real things the students are studying, within stories, or pulled from the students’ own writing. It gives them something to attach their learning to and shows them how the word functions in the real-life framework of our language.
In recent years, there’s been increasing pressure for teachers to expand their role from teaching academic subjects only to being leaders in the social-emotional realm as well. We are expected to monitor students’ behavior for changes, be aware of when we need to provide counseling, notice kids who are socially struggling, and teach character-education curriculum. There’s no training for this, just an expectation that we know how. I’ve been asked to deliver lessons on how to be kind, how to manage feelings like sadness and anger, how to be resilient even when things are hard, and on how to have compassion and be empathetic.
The irony is that I’m being asked to teach students how to be resilient while also being told not to share any of the ways I’ve encountered adversity myself. While everything else is expected to be taught in context, social-emotional learning remains a separate entity, taught in sterile isolation as opposed to utilizing real-life examples. I’m not advocating to share the innermost details of my life with my students—I don’t want to. But is there something wrong with showing our students how to deal with days when we are sad or have our feelings hurt or feel angry? Is it wrong to model needing a break or having an off day or taking a moment to care for oneself?
Students need to see humanity in context—to see how it can function within the framework of life.
***
During the pandemic, at first, teachers were regarded as heroes when parents realized that educating their children was a surprising amount of work, and being endlessly patient was harder than it seemed. One mom lamented that she didn’t know how I handled “being around her kid all day” and as much as I wanted to, I didn’t remind her that it was her kid plus thirty-five more, five periods a day.
At the beginning, I felt hope: maybe this would change the way people viewed my profession.
As the virus dragged on, teachers were no longer saints learning to teach kids from home; we were described as lazy, horrible people who were somehow enjoying this nightmare of having a Zoom classroom instead of a real one. Parents assumed that somehow, we had the power to decide when and how we’d return to in-person school, with little understanding of how the teacher’s union actually functions, and zero regard for things like county health policies. There were never-ending arguments about when and how teachers could return to the classroom, vaccine be damned. I read endless rants about how taxpayers pay my salary, so therefore, they should dictate when and how we return.
I never once read a whiff of concern about teachers’ families, friends, or health needs.
One woman wrote on a district Facebook page, “We just need to get comfortable with the fact that some teachers and their family members are going to die, because kids need to be back in the classroom now.”
I took a screenshot of that comment and sent it to a few friends, one of whom replied, “Holy shit, don’t these people know that you’re human beings, too?”
***
Recently, I was sitting at my own teacher's happy hour. I don’t drink because it makes me sick, but I still go to spend time with my friend and blow off some steam.
“I wonder if seeing how wild things get after school on Fridays would make our students and their parents like us less or more,” a colleague mused, while nursing a third whiskey.
Some teachers said it would mean that parents wouldn’t trust us. Others felt like it would be good for them to see us being humans.
When we were done speculating, we toasted to never finding out.
Amy Estes is a writer, storyteller, and educator from Sacramento, CA. Amy’s humor writing has been featured on McSweeney's, Slackjaw, The Belladonna, Weekly Humorist, and others. Amy’s essay writing has been featured on the Huffington Post, Catapult, Evocations Review, The Financial Diet, PULP Mag, Livability, POPSUGAR, and others. Amy’s live storytelling has been featured in Mortified, Cliterary Salon, Greetings From Queer Mountain, and on SoulPancake. Currently, Amy teaches satire writing for the Second City and middle school English for a bunch of rad students. When she’s not writing or teaching others, you can find her drinking coffee with her wife and dogs, reading books, and watching her murder stories. Or napping, if we’re being real about it. Amy completed the first draft of her memoir, Let The Love Surprise You, in 2021 and is actively seeking literary representation and publication.
Tyler James Bangkok (TJB) is a queer, American artist who has lived and worked in Asia for ten years. Currently, based in Bangkok, where it lives with its Thai-Taiwanese boyfriend and their dogs while freelancing as an artist, producer, and doing community engagement. TJB was a founding member of Minneapolis Art on Wheels. Through creating video, painting, programming interactive video instruments, and performances, TJB seeks to explore its queer fantasy and the abstract world within and to affect and shape reality. With life experiences between male and female, Eastern and Western culture/ideologies, capitalism and socialism, and the developed and developing world, TJB finds the history and tradition of dada collage techniques useful in engaging people and mixing perspectives that different groups might have. TJB's “collage lifestyle" aims to create intersectional points of view. Thus, it always wants to use collage to bring various ideas or objects together to show their context, clash, or how they work together. As a queer kid growing up in rural Minnesota, it always felt suffocated and like there was something off-balance about the USA. TJB is also deeply inspired by the Situationist International and their constant critique of capitalism, control, and creative and social agency in society. Their concept of "detournement" or flipping pop culture images to show the reality behind the facade of what they represent is vital to TJB's practice. Also, TJB firmly believes in the powers of collage in manifesting and creating “chaos magic.”