Much as I would like to pretend otherwise, only three weeks remain before school becomes the dominant force in my life again. Honestly, it’s probably more like two weeks; that last week before staff reports is never free like the rest of the break. I feel the gravity of the next Monday throughout, scrambling to cobble together resources and reorganize evergreen documents for the familiar unknown that will arrive sooner than later.
There is always some element of excitement about the first day of school, something I can admit even while soured on so much else about the job. There’s an unknown quality that is terrifying but also hopeful. In my most optimistic moments, I track back to those earlier first school days that began without yet knowing many of the most important people in my life. This could be another such year, I tell myself, and that humbling thought usually buys my passage through that first week before the intense pressure begins to takes over.
Before I can reach those first days, though, I must navigate three days of preparation. These are truly gifts from our district; paid time to meet, collaborate, set-up, and organize are not givens everywhere or for every teacher. But that does not preclude them from being wrought with their own challenges. This includes my least favorite: the professional development day.
Such an occasion as this is brilliant in conception but can be problematic in its execution. The construction is straightforward: educational experts present about issues and strategies in education to help inform our work as we enter the new year. Some years this takes the form of a singular orator who presents an extended lecture, but most years pair a shorter large group address with smaller sessions on focused topics. Our district works hard to select relevant speakers and breakouts, which is indeed both admirable and appreciated. What is relevant varies by instructor, so choice is a valuable thing, even if the timing of this work—two days before butts are in desks—strikes me as a tad suboptimal.
Inevitably, though, one of those sessions will deal with student wellness. Because that has been and continues to be relevant to me, inevitably I will attend that session. Also inevitably: that session will serve as the first incision into my resolve and optimism.
Don’t take this to say “These sessions are bad” or even “I don’t derive value from these sessions”. These sessions are good; these sessions need to exist. Likewise: these sessions are relevant to the work I do so I should be attending them as a professional, and they are equally—if not more—relevant to other teachers. I want these sessions to happen because they benefit students even if a teacher only takes something minimal away from the work. But these sessions do tend to strike dissonant chords when paired with me, on personal and emotional levels alike.
Odd though it might sound for someone with experience in the realm of mental health, nowhere in the world do I feel more out of place than in these sessions. I am a frog undercover at a convention of 1980s Biology teachers. I’m not lying on the table, but I feel dissected, like the presenter is demonstrating scalpel technique to the room and no one notices the uncanny resemblance between the specimen and me. My skin never looks greener or feels slimier than at one of those breakouts.
Listening to someone talk about symptoms and expressions of mental and emotional unhealth should be in the third-person but never ceases to sound like the second-person. I don’t feel seen but spotted. Even when the subject matter focuses on the health of students, I can’t help but find myself in their characterizations and case studies. Coming out of a season when away from metaphorical Plutonium rods, I realize I am even greener. The sessions remind me not just of radiation but that I am radioactive, that I am glowing and that my cells are decaying and not just that I’m about to be exposed to the same harmful elements that will worsen that condition but also that my very work, no matter how mindful, will directly expose students to that radiation as well. It is a jarring moment when I notice the emerald hue in my reflection.
Mind you, the summer doesn’t make mental illness disappear. It’s still there; I ribbit and sport a faint aura of lime that at times I feel but that mostly remains imperceptible to human eyes. But also…it kinda does disappear. I have space from school; I have control of my life to a far greater degree from June to early-August. That break is a reprieve from all the stage work, all the grinding, all the demanding people and events and expectations that chase me into sweaty sleep each night. It is painful to be reminded that, for the next nine months, I will be returned to that world, that I will feel pressure to land on proper lily pads and avoid Geiger counters all the time again. That I will surrender myself and my peace in exchange for instructing and (hopefully) inspiring others. Any lingering thoughts that “This year will be different!” die an instant death when I am reminded of what lies ahead for those students and teachers for whom school amplifies their health struggles. It’s like my human eyes miss the wavelength during the warm summer months but, discussing wellness once again, I both see my green-ness and also remember my eyes are amphibians.
There’s another element that eats away at me, though. These presentations are professional, instructional presentations, focused around research and expert testimony about best practices and issues to be aware of. Their tone is, justifiably, quite professional and instructive while delivered by someone who works with struggling people and wants to spread awareness and inform educators about this boogeyman of a scary thing they may have heard whispers about called “mental health”.
Can you feel my tone breaking down already and becoming jaded? If so: good reading! I feel so bitter listening to even the best of presentations because I am jealous (also green!) of the people leading them. My bitterness rises like bile after a capsaicin-infused meal because it so frustrates me that these presenters are talking about me from the safety of academic distance. Mental health is a subject matter to them; un-wellness is a thing to gain knowledge about and study upon and present about. Mental health and wellness are scholarly pursuits, I hear Sam the Eagle pretentiously say to me whom he has forgotten is Kermit. The best presenters are so passionate that I hardly notice, but too often even they can’t stop themselves from waving their shiny mass-produced for scholastic distribution scalpels around and talking coldly about the frog liver we’ll be spotting on the left while the once-alive amphibian’s chest skin has been tacked to a cardboard tray.
Their remove is an incision all its own. While I (or at least those like me) lay prostrate on the table being cut open, they get to treat my frog organs like calculators or copies of The Great Gatsby. Their tools of instruction chase me around my own brain. It’s not that I want to be in their position; I don’t dream of being free of this part of myself so much as being able to tame it and keep it at bay. But hearing them speak unintentionally about me makes me envious and uncomfortable which in turns leads to me condemning myself for unexpressed bitterness toward good people trying to do good work. What if they too suffer in silence, letting this work become their outlet? What if they are simply better than I at masking their inherent frogginess? I glow brighter because that thought is more fuel for the fire of self-loathing, but I also glow for a non-ribbitting, non-radioactive green-eyed monster who wishes that I could compartmentalize like that and treat my own condition, my own inherent radioactive amphibity, as a matter of academic discourse.
The reminder that I cannot, though, fully induces the final dimension of misery in these sessions: self-incrimination. I can’t compartmentalize like them which means that I sit in silent squirming judgment while they do, even though I could be leading such a presentation. Why am I not using my voice? Why did I not keep pursuing counseling programs to build expertise in these areas, I interrogate my green self while pathologically ignoring their immense costs, the devious miscommunication by those asynchronous Texas programs, and the mountain of stress that juggling a graduate program and its hours of practical work for a job I don’t want alongside my actual teaching job and taking care of myself. How little I am actually doing compared to the boundless mantles I could be taking up, which means all of my stress and exhaustion and anxiety and burnout aren’t truly earned and then who’s to say if my mental health is all imagined then too or just a fiction of a failing creature? What is real?
It’s an icy slope and I am a radioactive frog whose webbed legs have forgone both pizza and french frying and just begun tumbling down the massive mountain picking up steam toward an inevitable collision or catastrophe that will end in a writhing splash of green goop at the bottom.
[[ This is how my brain works on its own. ]]
Professional development day doesn’t cut into my brain for science because that would be simpler. Professional development day attaches electrodes to my brain and shocks it into a heightened state of self-destructive accusatory evaluation because there is so much to be done by Thursday but I am now reeling over the things I don’t do but should do but can’t do and feel bitterguilty over not doing and also feeling misplaced bitterness towards a caring educator talking to me with pure intentions but whose inability to see that I am a glowing, Geiger-clicking, pond-swimming frog holding a scalpel and planning his next incision based on the greater good while already dead inside just makes him feel alone in a way that two months alone on his lily pad never did.
A good school year for me is many, many trying moments of intense out-of-breath work that densely pack around a few transcendent ones that somehow register as a worthwhile trade. For me those moments are almost never about math or academics; they are the moments in the middle of the year when something leads me to remove my human mask and others see my amphibian self and my emerald glow that they’d glimpsed briefly before but never well enough or for long enough that they could really see it and my act indices a groggy epiphany because they too speak in ribbits or they too keep plutonium rods under their pillows and cover up their glows with metaphysical concealer each morning. Those moments of raw truth, whether unscripted or planned, land differently for different people, but for every person who rolls their eyes over a grown frog with wet swamp tears there are dozens who are changed, dozens who will never order frog legs and never pretend that radioactivity is Chernobyl’s problem rather than ours. Radioactive mutations will be ravaging my cells and the chloroform will be rendering me a groggy froggy soon to be still but it will all somehow feel worth it, like all of the experience was worth it to impart that one lesson. 184 days plus infected weekends of burning green will feel worthy of those several hours of unmasking.
But on professional development day, those moments are too far away to inspire me. I am busy mourning the loss of my summertime agency that lets me hop around the local pond, too free to notice the glowing aura reflected in the water below me. Admirable though those presenters and presentations are, for me they are reminders of what I am and soothsayers of what is to come. They train me to enter a secondary space in which I must play act that I am human, even while fully aware of the defrogifying skin cream in my tote bag and the research about green light mitigation still pulled up on my phone behind the Google Classroom tab. In that way, such training should be invaluable…but I always feel like I fail those trainings, leaving in a heightened but invisible state of panic about how I’m going to make it through another year as a radioactive frog in a hostile world of scalpel-wielding students eager to learn about my glowing green spleen.
Or maybe I don’t fail the trainings so much as I just wish I could have stayed in the frame of logistical panic rather than existential and emotional panic. I get enough of the latter too on my own. When you can’t help but be green, sometimes you just want to look at the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum.
But I’ve got a couple weeks before that becomes my present rather than my future. That’s my consolation right now. Right now the lights are dim enough that I can’t see my glow, the scalpels are sitting sterile in a locked school room cupboard, and my brethren are leaping around unaware that their idyllic ecosystem is an industrial construct by a company in possession of a staggering supply of chloroform. I glow in peace right now. For now. But my green will become apparent very soon.
Ribbit Ribbit.
Content Consumption
FILM
(Each link leads to my full review on www.filmsofsteele.com.)
Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)
Gorgeous visuals of natural marshland provide a powerful setting for a story that strains to keep up with a central heroine who is too overpowered to feel real.
A sci-fi-horror film that delivers visual and intellectual thrills, Nope is another success by Jordan Peele that turns flying saucers into a source of inventive of cinematic excitement.
I had a blast in Oakland. Time keeps creeping forward but that fact does not change.