A Bit of Backstory

So you may be wondering just what exactly I'm rebooting from. I'll try to keep it short, but no promises.

Last year, I completed my education, or so I thought. I got my Master's Degree, I finished all of my studies, and I got a job. This job was teaching in a charter school in North Jersey, which for the first few months or so, was great.

Around the middle of the school year, things started going downhill super fast. The upper grades were already a challenge due to having four past teachers of Spanish in a row. By this point, they were getting outright disrespectful and rude. I called parents, but parents either didn't pick up or didn't care. The eighth grade teacher, my supposed mentor, screwed up my paperwork so I didn't get a standard license and she got knocked up to boot, which means she promptly forgot about me.

This mix made teaching her class damned near impossible. So when I got to my meeting regarding hiring in April, I knew deep down I wasn't going to make it. I still had two months to go in this place, and the adults let the kids know I wasn't coming back. All around me I heard the word, from kids and adults, "failure."

Never had I been in a situation where people were counting, no, hoping I would fail. The kids I can mostly forgive because they're young and everyone's an asshole in middle school, but I'm talking about the adults. Full grown men and women snarking at me behind my back and to my face. Men and women who made my job harder because they treated my subject like a joke in front of their kids. On my last day with them, I said my polite goodbyes, turned around, and never looked back.

For someone who, as a kid, freaked out when she got Bs on report cards, this was a pretty sucky school year. I entered a deep state of worry: Did I make the wrong choice to go into teaching? Am I just not made for it? What else can I do with this Master's I busted my ass trying to get? The job search wasn't much easier. The budget for New Jersey schools crashed this year, which means Language Teachers were the first ones cut. So most of the positions I stumbled across either wanted someone who spoke Spanish and another language, paid part-time for someone who would come in once a week (Good luck learning Spanish, kids!), or would require me to move far away for a job I wasn't 100% sure would last one year, never mind forever.

Luckily, things did turn around for me. But I'll leave that for another post.

RG