Back to School
The joys, hopes, and fears of a new and previous school year.
As this post hits your inbox, I’m wrapping up my first week of the 24-25 school year. It’s been the best start to a school year of the four that I’ve had as a teacher, and has led me to some reflection.
If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to backtrack to my semester of student teaching. It was the fall of 2020, in the depths of COVID. I was at a large suburban public high school that bounced between remote, hybrid, and remote formats over the course of the semester I taught there.
I had never experienced significant anxiety before, not really. But suddenly I found myself wracked with what I now know were panic attacks that lasted sometimes for hours at a time. My heart raced, I would feel a sense of existential dread, I catastrophised, and no amount of breathing exercises could calm myself. When that bell rang at the beginning of the day, my heart rate spiked and didn’t come down until the end of the day at 3:00.
Frankly, it was brutal. All the cortisol in my stomach depressed my appetite and I lost about 20lbs. It formed the perfect recipe of anxiety: the normal difficulty of student teaching + teaching during COVID + the existential fear of “I’ve-been-prepping-for-this-for-all-of-college-and-I’m-about-to-be-married-will-I-be-able-to-support-my-family” came together in a perfectly baked… flan. Or something. Though it was only about 12 weeks, it felt like an eternity.
The one saving grace of this time was that I slept like a rock. No dreams - just blissful nothingness. When I awoke it all came flooding back. I would retch into the sink, put my clothes on, and drive to school.
On many evenings during this time I found myself praying from Isaiah 26:3, over, and over, and over, and over again:
You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.
God! I would cry. You promised this! I think I trust in you- I want to, at least. I thought I had a clear sense that you called me to this. Why do I have to experience it? Can’t you intervene to end this now?
Well, he didn’t. Not directly. I can point to plenty of ways in which he provided for me during that time, but the thorn wasn’t removed completely - and wouldn’t be for some time. When student teaching finished, It was just about time for winter break. I’m not kidding when I say that I would have a visceral response when I saw a school bus on the road. I couldn’t look at or think about it. But despite the constant, low-level panic, I apparently did really well. Top marks from my cooperating teachers. Somehow.
The next semester was a reprieve, and had a lot of wonderful gifts. I closed out my college experience well. I did a tour in therapy, and in the spring, I took a job in a school. Somehow.
The next fall was worse. I was now the teacher of record, fully responsible for the students and curriculum in a school that was sorting through significant issues of its own. The gift of sleep eluded me: I had several sleepless nights, and at one point can remember breaking down on my way to work and calling my parents. I’m not really sure what I wanted them to do, I just needed some relief. I saw a psychiatrist, tried some meds. Some worked, others made it worse.
But then, on one random November day in my first year of teaching, Courtney kindly surprised me by bringing me coffee in the middle of the work day. She asked me how my day was. My answer surprised me:
It’s been good. Like, I’m actually really enjoying this. I think I’m good at it. This makes sense.
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tower high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”1
I wrote last week that the Lord of the Rings fairly reliably can bring me to tears, and the above is one of the scenes. It makes me think of that time three years ago where out of the darkness of anxiety, panic, exhaustion, and, frankly, despair, I was granted a glimpse of the white twinkle of starlight that is the Joy of teaching.
Granted is an intentional choice of words. I believe that glimpse was a gift. It smote me. I still would have rather God granted me reprieve from the anxiety earlier. I suppose in many ways my brutal student teaching and first year of teaching have made me a teacher better than my four years might suggest, if I can be so forward. But saying “at least I got something out of it” doesn’t fully heal the pain of carrying that ring around my neck through the wastes of Mordor for a year. It’s still with me, though the Lord in his mercy has largely freed me from that weight, at least for now.
This brings me to Tuesday. On my way to work, on the second day of school in my fourth year, I was able to say that I was looking forward to the day, looking forward to the year. As I drove down lake street, under the L tracks not far from where they filmed a killer scene in The Dark Knight, I snapped the picture at the top of this post. I’m not totally sure why I felt compelled to, It’s a fine photograph but nothing special. Something about the early morning light filtering down onto the tracks smote me, to use Tolkein’s language. It felt hopeful.
I’ve used the word “somehow” in this post a number of times. At the time these things happened it felt like “somehow,” but looking back it’s marginally easier to see how God was good and provided in the midst of struggle. I think of a section of a prayer in Asheritah Ciuciu’s marvelous book Prayers of Rest:
Even when I don’t understand You, I can trust You because You are good.2
Also, I think of something I heard on a podcast with a man who had gone through a crisis of faith: I wrote down the exact quote somewhere that is now lost to me, but he said something along these lines, referencing Hebrews 1: No matter how we approach the “problem of pain” in theology, at least we can come away knowing that we have a savior who chose to suffer and can empathize with our own suffering. In saying “not yet” to my prayers for relief, God was acutely aware of my suffering and participated in it with me.
I’ve had a couple good years since all this happened, but I feel especially thankful at the beginning of this fourth school year. There are still things to be worried about, nervous for, perhaps even anxious about. But I can rest in the fact that I’ve seen that clear, white starlight above the clouds. For the shadow, deep as it might be, is “only a small and passing thing.”
The Return of the King, ch. 2. Tolkien survived action in WWI, at the Somme of all places. His experience pervades his writing if you look closely enough. This passage smacks too much of other things I’ve read about soldiers’ experience in trenches in the fields of western France to think that this sentiment is unrelated.
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