Teaching: "Conscience Seared"

I often could not understand why I was so upset when I walked onto the campus from day to day.

I feared the worst, thought the best, predicted everything in between, and still the events of the day, the remains of what I went through, never prepared me for what I had to face.

The nature of the job is a war that never ends. Walking onto the field of battle, the teacher never knows what to expect. How the students behave, even for a full-time teacher, can change at a moment's notice. The volatile nature of students, especially the middle school-high school set, defies one's patience.

The teacher is responsible for a number of factors, the vast majority of which is out of his control. Even if I was the full-time teacher under contract for those classes, still I faced innumerable, incalculable obstacles.

For one, the students' moods would be on or off, and there was very little that I could do about that. One young man was enduring a divorce between his parents, so that brought a number of issues into the classroom.

The number of broken homes and broke parents that these kids lived with added to the constraints on what I could do as a teacher.

One mother would tell me that she all but gave up on her daughter, who came to class hungry every day. She refused to do any work, she didn't have a problem coming to class with an attitude problem.

Then there were the AP students, too smart for my good, who could manipulate their parents, who in turn intimidates administrations, who then grated on me for causing them problems. I ended up in the principal's office more often as a teacher than ever as a student, never able to follow the rules which were laid out, both on the record and unofficial. Teaching is hard enough, but the mixed messages that never end, they are enough to drive so many young and vibrant teachers out of the profession altogether.

Every day, the drove of dread reared its ugly head for me. The gray cloud of wondering what would happen next, for better or for worse, hanged over me with no end.

At the time, I could not identify for better or for worse what was going on in my life. I just assumed that a dark foreboding was what educating kids was all about. I am fortunate that circumstances got so bad, that I could no longer take the drain and abuse of trying to manage the unmanageable.

A teacher ends up having a "seared conscience", which contrary to common understanding does not refer to a no sense of sin at all, but really a perpetual sense of sin and guilt. On one hand, a teacher worries about getting through the lesson in a timely manner. On another note, the teacher wonders constantly about how to handle difficult students, how to deal with irresponsible or arrogant parents, and also the unwieldy administration.

The "seared conscience" of never being done follows a teacher wherever he goes. The work is just never done. Even after a good day at school, the next day of errors and terrors bubbles up with the teacher. During my first year of full time teaching, the best hours of they day were between 4pm and 10pm, when I went to sleep. Not in a classroom, not planning or teaching, providing nothing for anyone else, I was very much like the students, could not wait to get out of the classroom and go home for the day.

Some of the greatest moments for me were driving West on the105 to go home, the sense of relief washing over me. This release contrasted sharply with the taut trauma that I endured driving East to the high school on the same freeway, yelling and regretting that I had ever become a teacher. "I hate being a teacher" I would say to myself. Often, the only thing that carried me through was Donna Summer's "Last Dance", her rhythms driving me out of my frustration and despair.

Yet even then, the "last dance" did not last long enough to carry me through for the entire day. A "seared conscience" cannot be removed with distractions, but with removal from the thinking and the scene which invokes a sense of sin and shame and failure, a triple threat which many teachers cannot escape, so responsible are they for issues and people and outcomes which are beyond their control.