Thoughts on Being an English Teacher

And Leaving it all Behind

I realized I hadn’t taken any photos with the ninth-grade students and that, as a result, I had very little evidence of our lovely year together, of our year together during my final year teaching (at least for now, I continue to tell myself). It was the end of May and the first weekend of summer break—and I was struggling. Walking away from remarkable young lives proved far more difficult than bidding graduates farewell each year and that is always difficult. The latter, of course, is the natural order of things: I remain in place while another group of teenagers, to whom many of us have become attached, walk out the door one last time. One of the few consistencies in a life of teaching is this perpetual cycle of change—of yearly goodbyes followed by a process of getting to know the new students who are never going to be anywhere near as delightful as the previous year’s students but always are, and often for different reasons. I worked in a small school where I had the privilege of teaching the same students for two years— sometimes, three, even four. So returning each year meant seeing familiar faces, along with all of the new ones. And I counted on the former. Last year, when I was rather nervous about returning for the new school year (so many teachers are), I knew it would be fine the moment I saw the seniors outside greeting everyone, and when part of that same group met me in the parking lot and we walked to my classroom together. This was yet another reminder that, more often than not, I relied on the students far more than they likely relied on me.

I took a job teaching high school English eight years ago because I could no longer afford to live in the state of abject poverty to which I had been reduced as an adjunct faculty member at the local University. I was experiencing reverse cultural shock, having moved home after six years in the UK, missing the little life I had built for myself, and coming to terms with the fact that a tenure-track academic position at a University was increasingly unlikely. Teaching high school had never been in the plan: I did not think I would like teenagers, having disliked the majority of my fellows when I was a teenager, nor did I relish the idea of having to teach to an exam. I told myself that I would give it a year. Maybe, I thought, I can make a difference. And maybe, just maybe, some of the students will walk away with a fondness for Thomas Hardy or Langston Hughes. This is what I told myself. But with each passing school year, I found myself staying “just one more year,” for the students because somehow I was trying to convince myself that the students would one day not be worth staying for, and then it would be easy to walk away. And that never happened. Because I signed up for a job where I thought I could make a difference in young lives when, as it turned out, they made all the difference in mine. 

It is difficult to imagine any group of individuals more generous and friendlier than the students with whom I spent so many days. A former student used to say, “you’ve got this, Dr. Briggs,” whenever I seemed stressed. And I believed him because I respected him and valued his opinion. I did “have it,” but he had the wisdom to know I needed that extra bit of encouragement. I was thinking about this the other day and wondering, “Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Wasn’t it my job to inspire confidence?” And yet, I have since gone through moments of trepidation knowing that I could handle it because the students believed in me. They are perceptive, these “little ones,” as my friend Irina calls teenagers and college students. We need others to support us and life is so much better when we can support others, too. “What do we live for,” George Eliot writes in Middlemarch, “if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?” This is something I think many of my students already knew. 

They look out for one another, hold one another accountable, and treasure the memories as they are happening. One student, who adored her peers, wrote down every humorous moment from each class in a notebook. My teaching assistant from the class of 2023 would, whenever he passed by the classroom, give me a questioning thumbs up, to make sure everything was okay. Sometimes, if we met in the hall, he would pass me the can of Pringles he was often carrying (was it the same can?) so I could take one or two. No words were necessary; this was just part of our daily wellness check, so to speak. They know if you are having a bad day and will try to make it better. They know when you care deeply about something and will show up on account of it. Sometimes, if I couldn’t put my emotions into words, they would do it for me. I was telling one of my students last year that my beloved nephew had gone off to college. I was thrilled for my nephew—I wanted this for him—but I was emotional and not handling it well, and I did not know why. “Aw, they grow up fast, huh,” my student said, as we waited for the morning announcements. 

What I discovered—and much to my surprise—each day as I drove to work across unattractive, dusty freeways, through drab desert suburbs, and to a pre-fabricated structure that resembled a prison (as so many schools do these days), was that I wanted to be there. I wanted to be there so I could be with them. 

Somehow that was enough. Is there a better occupation than spending one’s day with a group of teenagers who are thoughtful, helpful, compassionate (many of those who received academic awards were made uncomfortable by the fact that it would make those who did not feel worse), hilarious, irreverent, nonjudgmental (for the most part), creative, endearing (they collect Hot Wheels), uncomplaining (okay, only a handful don’t complain), bright, charming, positive, honest (I lost count of the number of times some of them told me they did not finish reading Jane Eyre (only after the fact, mind)), exhausted, resilient, discerning (they see through the bs), courageous, emotional, strong, and everything beyond and in between?

Students are not perfect, of course; none of us are. But I liked that. I liked our shared humanity and the fact that I could always be myself in front of them because they are authentic, too. They listened, for the most part, and it meant the world. And who better else to discuss your horrible, new haircut with than a group of students who will laugh about it with you, offer perspective, remind you what matters most? And in no other environment than in a classroom could I walk in and say, “Have you seen that NBA player with a face like John Keats?”, and know that someone would know exactly who I was referencing. 

It was chaotic, sometimes to the extent that it drove me mad, but so many memorable moments emerged out of the chaos in a way that I expect is universal in education—as universal as students thinking The Catcher in the Rye speaks more to their generation than to any other. There are the students who have a habit of falling asleep in class, the ones who cannot sit still, the ones who are obsessed with having as many perfectly sharpened pencils as possible, at all times, and those who can never find anything in their enormous and disorganized stack of papers, which they carry everywhere. You walk into the building of a morning and see the lad, a senior, flexing his biceps in front of a group of little kids; you hear a student practicing “Ode to Joy” on a trumpet, out of tune; you hear the laughter of one student—and know exactly who it is and your heart overflows with love. 

It isn’t easy. Because when you love them, or when you care and they don’t, it can break your heart. And there will always be the students who tell you that none of “this” matters, or the students who are mad at you or want to punish you by giving you the cold shoulder—they are teenagers, after all. There are the students who will ask the same question even though you have already answered the question multiple times. And the students who want extra help, at the last minute, having refrained from doing their homework most of the year. But you end up helping them anyway.

Me and the never-ending pile of essays.

They may have driven me nuts, but it was my job to have faith in them, and that was the best job in the world. You can find beauty in every mind, or personality, just as you can find something thoughtful in each and every essay (maybe not the essay typed in 24-point font). That is the beauty of being the adult in a room of promising young minds. The privilege of working with teenagers is that you can find goodness in everybody, something that, as adults, we may not always find, or at least look for, in our peers. 

And in no other environment than in a classroom do you have such an intermingling of high and low. I have been awed by coruscating prose and thought-provoking, novel analysis of numerous texts, as much as I have laughed, to the extent that I cried, at the ridiculous, even the profane. “What is it about me,” I once screamed, “that makes you think I always need an update on your bowel movements?” Because, reader, not only would they tell me, they would announce it to the class. And those large gatherings with music and dance in Regency Britain where the complexities of status and the marriage market played out in assembly halls and private homes? All I can say is that when the word “balls” is typed on a slide about Pride and Prejudice under the category of “entertainment,” it becomes something else entirely when that one gent in the corner can’t control his laughter. Another thing I learned about myself during this time of teaching was that neither could I. Teaching allows you, with your discretion, to embrace (or make room for) levity. I learned not to take myself too seriously. We have to find joy where and when we can, after all. 

When a student said he would demonstrate a dance move known as “the griddy” but needed a running start, of course I permitted him to go out into the hallway, which he did, and, as a result, he seamlessly demonstrated the movement, much to everyone’s enjoyment (in case you are wondering, this preceded a serious discussion on Middlemarch). 

There was the student who, when he answered his phone during a brief interval during class (!!!) said, without skipping a beat, “Home of the whopper, what’s your meat? Oh, hi, mom.” And last year, when two students were late to class because they had picked up breakfast burritos for themselves on the way to school, it was enough to test anyone’s patience; but then, I shit you not, one of them actually had the nerve to ask if he could leave class to find a fork. And my rage in such moments was, to them, farcical. Because the rotten little things knew I adored them. 

And there were the stories that they shared with one another and, eventually, with me, with their teachers—the stories that would become the stuff of legends. These are the stories that belong to them. 

The classroom, or the group of students in it, has its own shared history, making it a sort of micro-community within the larger one. I had a group of students one year who referred to their Tess of the D’Urbervilles essay as their “Tessay,” and another class would write funny poems on the board about whatever we happened to be reading. Always unsigned, they belonged, collectively, to everyone. Last year, after my youngest and chattiest students were given assigned seating, one referred to her group of friends, forever after and with a sense of drama, as “the diaspora.” We also shared a collective crush on Laurence Olivier, having watched the film version of Rebecca (1940). In one class, with only eleven students, we had a long-running joke that, whenever I asked a review question, the answer was usually John Donne, but no one ever remembered his name. That is, until the one time the answer was not John Donne and someone did. Students—teenagers—have a wonderful sense of irony. And a shared appreciation of life’s little ironies is what helps them get through. Because it is not easy. 

Much has been written about the struggles of this generation, particularly as they emerged from the pandemic, but it is not my purpose to discuss that here. All I will say is that they are young and they are trying to figure it out. With students, I was honest about the fact that I was trying to figure it out, too. Aren’t we all?  You can be honest with them. But I think what I wanted most for my students, and I still do, is for them to be passionate about something, passionate to the extent that, if they are chasing a life devoted to the things they care about most, they can bounce back from failure. Or I don’t want them to lose their passion for whatever it is that brings meaning to their lives. They don’t necessarily have to choose a career that is fueled by passion (that notion is fraught with issues), but I want them to care deeply about something, whether it is poetry or art or sports or cars or medicine or sustainability or music or even something others might consider trifling. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that they do. Perhaps the kids are alright, after all. 

Teaching is personal. That is why it is difficult, but also why it is so rewarding. This is why it is all-consuming, meaningful, exhausting, messy. You worry about the students when they are worried, and you worry about the students when they aren’t, but should be. My dad, a lifelong educator who worked as a coach and teacher in Flint, Michigan, and then as an inner-city high school principal in Phoenix, Arizona, used to leave the house at 5:00 in the morning to open the school for students who needed to use the facilities in the gym so they could do their laundry, not having access to these things on the streets. He made sure they had breakfast, too. We didn’t see much of my dad during the school year and I remain an early riser because I had to wake up early in order to see him before he left for work. But only after becoming a teacher myself did I understand why. Only in working with students do you realize what you would sacrifice for them.

In all of this—in the immense responsibility to keep students safe, to make sure they have everything they need, to help them when they are struggling—it seems unfortunate that what they are learning should even come into question. Much, too, has been written about the “usefulness” (and “useful” either means earning power or a sort of Utilitarian, Gradgrind-induced view of the world) of the arts and humanities, and it is frustrating that one increasingly feels the need to justify not only the value of literature in the classroom but a life devoted to it. 

The fact that I got to spend my time with these students discussing literature and poetry was simply an added bit of fortune. They made beloved novels richer, more complex, more dear. The scholar’s life is an isolated one: up until that moment, the moment when I became their teacher, the majority of my days had been spent alone with my thoughts, with my books. Teaching full-time forced me, in the best way, to bring my innermost thoughts—about literature, history, culture, about the daily humdrum of existence, about hopes and dreams and failures—to the surface. More often than not, students responded with the same. 

What a privilege it has been to witness a student’s progress, to celebrate the seemingly small but great strides in an essay, a thought, or a point made. To see one student, visibly moved, by Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” as by Robin Milford’s musical rendition of it. I will never forget the moment I asked a student what he thought of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and how he closed his eyes and said,“It’s exquisite.” Or the student who soaked up everything one said like a sponge and made it better. There were so many moments like these. Last year, when the students finished reading A Raisin in the Sun, one student said something along the lines of, “bruh, that was pretty amazing, not gonna lie.” And I will never forget the resounding, palpable gasp from a group of students when they discovered Wilfred Owen almost made it. 

None of us should have to explain why any of this is vital. The usefulness of education and, from my perspective, an education in the humanities, lies not simply in its capacity to develop our use of language, argument, or the ability to engage with complexities—and—of course, there is immense value in these skills. The usefulness of an education in the humanities lies in its capacity to establish community and friendship, a comfortable setting where students and teachers can come together to listen, to discuss and question and debate the very nature of what it means to be human, as we try to navigate our complicated lives in the present. These are the moments that are not always quantifiable, but they are essential. 

It is a privilege to be invested in someone’s future, to offer support along the way, to witness growth, both personal and intellectual. As I would discover, the students were also invested in mine. They told me, when they knew I was leaving, that I would figure it out; they encouraged me to write. When I told two students that I would not be returning in the fall (and burst into tears), they were both incredibly kind: “we just want you to be happy, Dr. Briggs.” I was happy with them. And I miss them so much it hurts. But I was exhausted. The years of stress which began long before I started teaching had taken a toll on my health. The yearly goodbyes had become increasingly difficult (goodness, I am so grateful for those who have stayed in touch). And it is time, as difficult as it is, for a change. It is time to carve out a life of my own. And time continues to march on. 

Being surrounded by teenagers keeps you young but sometimes serves as a stark reminder that you are, in fact, getting older. “How much older are you than Devin Booker, really, Dr. Briggs,” one student asked, looking slightly scandalized and concerned last Spring as he referenced my fondness for our beloved shooting guard. I looked him straight in the eye and gave him a number which was, in fact, a lie. I may not be too old to adore Book, I thought (is anyone too old for that?), but I am most certainly too old to still have the finances of a recent, debt-ridden college graduate. 

I have always struggled financially and continue to live with the insurmountable student loan debt that brought me to teaching in the first place. They exist, these loans, like the dust heap in Our Mutual Friend, forever broken down, forever replenished, permeating the air I breathe. And yet, as it proved for the characters in Dickens’s novel, there is a life-giving force in dust—flecks of gold amidst the rubbish…and after seven years they number into the 100s. I have spent the last few months at times bemoaning my life choices. Was all the time and money spent on my education worth it? I am constantly reminded, no doubt by society and my phone’s algorithm, of the lack of return on my investment. 

But I know—I have always known—that the riches gained, though not financial, were worth the risk. I know this even on the most difficult days when I wish I had gone about everything differently and when I wish I could go back in time and make “better” choices. My costly, stressful education became an offering of sorts, and the return was worth its weight in gold. Not only do I have memories that will sustain me for future years, but I now have faith in the future, having been long in company with the very best. 

I am entering an uncertain stage of my life and it is terrifying, but I have to believe in possibility around each corner. Because there were so many times when my students made me believe that anything was possible. One year, after I forced students to read both Ethan Frome and Great Expectations, one of them asked, “Do you believe in love like, at all, Dr. Briggs?” I told him that yes, in fact, I do. Even if I hadn’t believed in it for myself—which I do—I believe in it because they believe in it. I believe in it for them.