“Evil Teacher.” Marker on whiteboard. Artist unknown.

In fifth grade, I told my parents I was going to be a teacher when I grew up. I loved school and toiled over homework in order to please. After parent-teacher conferences I would hound my parents to share, in detail, what my teachers had said about me. “They said you’re very bright, that you’re a delight in class. Ms. Wegner told me you set the curve for the last history test.” I hung on these words, treasuring them. I was considered a good kid.

Which is why I was so surprised to find myself, a dozen years and a master’s degree later, on the dark side: I am a bad kid. Except this time I am on the other side of the desk seat — I am a bad teacher.

Despite their kinder instincts, teachers can’t help but categorize students, consciously or otherwise, into camps of good and bad. When discussing students amongst ourselves, we often catch ourselves using such terminology too freely, at which point a bad kid becomes a “problem kid, troubled kid, kid with issues.”

“Good” kids: generally students who benefit from financially stable, supportive families, who are polite and motivated to do well in school.

“Bad” kids: how do I even begin? Where good kids must be uniform to fit our definition, bad kids come in so many shapes and sizes. These are the students who come to school high, gaze at their phones with no attempt at stealth, hate you, hate everyone, hate themselves, sneak out to smoke, who are sexually active at fourteen. They are the students who are hungry — for the breakfast they couldn’t get at home, for approval, for attention. Often they think they are stupid and likely have been told as much. Bad kids may embody one or all of these things.

As for bad teachers? We didn’t mean to be this way. I’d been honing myself for this job since I was ten. My teaching position at my first school was considered cushy, being at a “good” school with mostly “good” kids. Still, I floundered.

If you pay attention to the news you are likely aware of the odds stacked against teachers these days: extreme stress, low pay and high work load, enormous class sizes, underfunded schools, inadequate facilities, paying university tuition while working at a school for free to make a rather pitiful salary upon graduation, helicopter parents,the psychological strife of childhood poverty, constant testing, irrelevant white-centric curriculums that ignore adolescent interests, the lack of respect — this on top of whatever difficulties are already faced by a job that requires you to not only keep dozens of children in the same room from descending into Lord of the Flies madness, but also make them learn something. If you are sitting here thinking I’m being dramatic and that teaching is easy (summers off, right?), I can say with confidence you’ve never taught a day in your life. I assure you my failure was not from lack of effort.

Arriving three weeks into the school year after another teacher had left for greener pastures, I had over 170 students (imagine you have an assignment that takes just one minute to grade, and do that math. Now imagine it’s an essay), three preps, and two new learning management systems to navigate. All of this was conducted on a Mac, an operating system with which I was so helpless I had to ask a student to show me how to scroll down a page (two finger scroll, so intuitive!) so I could see the second half of my classroom roster to take attendance.

Standing in front of thirty kids at a time felt like performing a musical three times in a row for a restless audience, every day. Much of my labor was devoted simply to crowd control. Once they were quietly seated, trying to get them to engage was often a fool’s errand of herding cats.

I’d come home and spend most of the evening grading and chewing on my lip, hoping for a lightning bolt of creativity to strike when I asked myself the question, what the hell am I going to do with a hundred seventy teenagers tomorrow? I suffered many a panic attack as I visualized myself standing in front of them empty handed, having concocted no creative way to communicate the cultural relevance of The Odyssey. I recalled a book I read in one of my graduate courses, which described the way Japanese schools regard each lesson as a polished stone; they tape teachers at work and watch the video together, asking how it might be perfected so that it is logically sequenced, caters to all learning types, provides enough wait time, is engaging, and flows seamlessly with the rest of the curriculum. Ha! The theory I paid to learn couldn’t save me now.

I tried to explain to loved ones why I was always so depleted, why I poured a glass of wine the minute I walked in the door before I even took off my shoes. Imagine you have to host a party every day, I told them. As hostess, you must always be upbeat. The party has to be fun and interesting to everybody all the time. Also, lots of your party-goers hate you and each other and don’t want to be there. Fun, right?

Some days, despite my best efforts, I was stitching lessons together up until the minute before they started. Important emails slipped through the cracks. My turnaround for returning homework to students was a couple weeks. Any interruption to the school’s routine blindsided me and sent me reeling; I was like that idiot tuba in band class that misses the key change, every time, and honks loudly out of tune. No matter how many hours I put in, I was always a step behind.

This is not what good teachers look like.

At meetings and professional development, I found myself resisting the urge to roll my eyes. The endless rhetoric of How to Be a Better Teacher (brought to you by Someone Who has Not Stepped in a Classroom since they Graduated From One) not only made me feel overwhelmed and like a total failure — it made me hostile. I sent an email during a meeting to a colleague, which read: “kill me.” I wanted to throw my shiny MacBook (the answer to our failing schools is technology, right?) out the window and scream.

If you want an ideal teacher, give me an ideal classroom. Why are my class sizes twice the size research says they should be? Why don’t I have a mentor teacher? Why do we keep students seated for hours when we know they need physical movement and can’t focus for more than 15 minutes at a time? How am I supposed to pry my 14-year-old students away from their cell phones long enough to make them even consider caring about a literary curriculum that is entirely divorced from their lived experience?

The answer is, of course, by being a hero.

The other day an article from Edutopia popped up on my newsfeed. The article was titled What it Means to be a Great Teacher. The caption underneath it read, “a great teacher uncovers hidden treasures, possibilities, and magic right before everyone’s eyes.”

Magic right before everyone’s eyes. To repeat an earlier plea: kill me. Apologies to all, but I am not magical. Nor am I Hilary Swank from Freedom Writers. I am not a hero and I don’t have endless patience. The articles about what makes a teacher good smack of those vintage clippings detailing the expectations of a good wife. Keep the house spotlessly clean, but do it smiling in high heels.

It was after school one day late in the year — trying and failing to concentrate on grading — that the light bulb finally clicked on: my experience as a teacher mirrored that of my students. I’d been too caught up in my own failure to see that like students, teachers are polarized into opposite camps of good and bad, of heroes and villains, martyrs and traitors. We both endure a pyramid of people to criticize us at every level, from the bottom up: students, yourself, other teachers, parents, administrators, the state, all the way up to the federal government. It took hours of sitting in those same rigid plastic chairs my students are camped in all day, hearing administrators rain upon us about our inadequacies, to make me realize we were in the same trap.

My students were as burnt out as I was.

The disparity between where we were and where we were expected to be was gaping and the support needed to bridge that chasm felt flimsy. Had I not stared down at my students — indeed, through them — turning a blind eye to the fact that they reeked of cigarettes, to the knowledge that all was not well at home, ignoring the reality of their lives, spouting rhetoric about how Romeo and Juliet was important?

I couldn’t make them drink the Kool-Aid because I couldn’t drink it either, no matter how many “come to Jesus” meetings I had with school personnel. Bad students are well aware of their labels and struggle to care about a system that doesn’t care about them. Similarly, I felt the system was not here to help me so much as judge me. Couldn’t we have a system that fosters us both?

I ran into a friend and veteran teacher, a woman I admire enormously who is beloved by students everywhere. When she asked how teaching was going, my apparent misery poked through my carefully constructed response. I braced myself to endure her disappointment. Instead she looked me dead-on and said, “Get out. Get out of it now.” She went on to describe the pity she had for her colleagues, many young women in their 30’s, who were struggling to raise kids and pay off student loans and mortgages on their measly salaries. During the school year, they hardly had time for their own children. “It wasn’t always like this,” she told me.

I was floored. She was the kind of teacher I’d wanted to be, a staple in the community, and here she was, telling me to save my own skin. That conversation was a blessing; a mentor gave me the permission I craved to say, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

So in June, when my students walked out of the classroom for summer break, I left with them.

To be fair, I don’t think I’m cut out to be a lifelong high school teacher for a big reason unrelated to the current teaching climate and the particular circumstances of my school: I never knew how introverted I really was until forced to stand in front of young adults all day long. And yet I wonder if I would’ve stayed longer, or if my year would have been less miserable, if my environment had been different. And though I was imperfect, I actually wasn’t a bad teacher; I cared a lot, and I managed to form solid bonds with many of my students and inspire some of them, if not all. I haven’t ruled out coming back to teaching later, if I find a classroom environment that better suits my needs; like most teachers, I’d take better teaching conditions over better pay in a heartbeat. And I will never cease being a noisy advocate on behalf of educators everywhere.

In fact, while I was disappointed in myself for leaving, the recent slew of articles about the national teacher shortage pitching communities into chaos made me realize that my quitting wasn’t just an effort to recover my mental health — it was itself a political stance, and one that many other former teachers are taking with me. And the stance is this: I don’t want to be a hero — I don’t want to be the hinge on which everything rests, the last barrier of hope for young people against impoverished communities, and underfunded, ineffective school systems that can’t even agree what success looks like because the people at the top can’t agree either. Stop relying on teachers as martyrs for when they do “well” and scapegoats for when they don’t. And while I deeply admire the tough cookies who have opted to stay, many other former teaching hopefuls like me are not afraid to say that we are not going down with this ship. Our classrooms need a complete makeover to provide all students a chance to succeed, and giving our teachers the time, trust, and resources they need is part of that equation.

As Jane’s dad tells her on the show Jane the Virgin, “Teaching…well, somebody’s got to do it.” Somebody indeed. And who will it be?