What I Miss

by: Tammy Marshall

I left teaching a year ago to concentrate on writing. I taught for 30 years — my first year in one school and the remaining 29 in the small town where I still reside. I couldn’t wait to leave teaching; I wanted to get out of it for years before I ever did because writing has always been my true calling.

However, I sincerely thought that by now I would miss teaching a little. I do not. Not even a little, itty, teensy bit.

I especially don’t miss those crazy and hectic last couple months of a school year, but as area high school graduations are upon us now, it has given me pause to really think about those 30 years I spent at the head of a classroom and to try to think of things I miss.

Photo by Vasily Koloda on Unsplash

These are in no particular order.

I miss — 1. some of the students and 2. some of the staff. That’s it.

I don’t miss making lesson plans — those things that would be obsolete within an hour of submitting them because things would happen and I’d have to change the plans on the fly. Every. Single. Week. Of the 30 years I taught. Not once did the lesson plans I made for the week stay intact for the duration of that week.

I don’t miss disciplining and policing other people’s children. Far too many non-teaching expectations fall upon teachers’ shoulders, and I don’t agree with that. Teachers have specific knowledge — in my case, it is Spanish, English, and other language-related classes — and we should be sharing that knowledge with our students. That’s what should be happening in a classroom, and if that’s what truly happened, then I might still be teaching. But I don’t want to yell at your child or have to send him to the hallway so the other 15 kids in my room can actually learn something or have to spend precious time calling for and waiting for the principal to come to my room to take care of a problem, etc. And I certainly don’t want to be trying to figure out which kids are on drugs or have alcohol in their water bottles or have vaping paraphernalia in their backpacks or have potential weapons on them or blah, blah, blah.

I don’t miss the inane staff meetings in which we’d spend hours on continuous improvement strategies that were utterly pointless because there was never any follow-through, and the things we’d work hard on one month would be completely forgotten or changed the next month.

I don’t miss having new technology shoved down my throat with no real training. I don’t miss the expectations to use and implement technology more than I ever needed and in ways that were meaningless to the things I was trying to get the students to learn and understand.

I don’t miss the constant class interruptions that could be anything from sudden announcements on the P.A. system, to unannounced fire drills in the middle of a test I needed my kids to finish, to other students barging in to find out which students of mine were willing to work the concession stand for an organization, to the office calling to say a student needed to leave because a parent was coming to get her, to the janitors feeling the need to mow outside my window in the middle of my class time, to another teacher calling my room to ask if a certain student was available to go to his room to finish a test, to etcetera ad nauseam.

I don’t miss all the late nights that involved everything from directing school plays, to attending events, to coaching the one-act play, to helping take gate money at games, to staying at school until after nine p.m. simply trying to catch up or taking so much work home that I’d be at it until well after ten p.m., to doing parent-teacher conferences, to helping decorate for prom, to practicing with students after school for speech, to just having to be at school from sun up to sun down day after day after day.

I don’t miss answering to everyone but myself. Now, the only person to whom I answer is me. I am my own boss, and it is glorious. Glorious, I tell ya.

I don’t miss spending the bulk of my so-called “summers off” preparing for the next school year.

I don’t miss only being able to take vacations in the summer when everyone else and their dogs are also on vacation. Now I can vacation whenever I damn well please.

Photo by Alex Azabache on Unsplash

I don’t miss bells. In fact, I don’t miss them so much that I wrote an entire blog post about it months ago. You can read that post here: A Bell-free Life at Last

I don’t miss creating worksheets, tests, activities, etc. While I am a creative person, and I can honestly say that I did enjoy coming up with some of those things, overall it was simply exhausting.

I don’t miss teenage drama. Ugh. And I really don’t miss overreacting, helicopter parents. Double ugh.

I don’t miss grading papers and tests. What a waste of my time. The longer I taught, the fewer assignments I ever gave out, and when I did assign things, I tried to make them things that the students would be able to grade with me, so that way they would actually look at their mistakes and learn from them. Otherwise, when you return a paper, the only thing the kids look at is the grade, and then it goes right in the trash, so there’s no reason for me to waste countless hours marking up their papers in a futile attempt to get them to see what they’d done wrong and learn from it.

I don’t miss eating school lunches, riding on school buses, and sitting through school assemblies.

Photo by Austin Pacheco on Unsplash

There are many more things I do not miss, but as I said above, I do miss some of the students and some of the staff because when it comes down to it, those people are the only things that truly matter. When kids would come to my class eager to learn or when they’d suddenly “get” something I was teaching them, well, those moments were priceless and they made all the other nonsense bearable — up to a point. Teachers are a unique breed, and most have hearts of gold, so I loved working with people like that. Unfortunately, most of a teacher’s time is spent with students and not with those other wonderful adults. If I could have spent more time, or even some time, with the other teachers every day, it would have made my job so much more enjoyable.

So, at this one-year anniversary of my retirement from teaching, I do not regret my decision even the tiniest bit. The things I miss are things I actually still have because I have great relationships with so many former students and so many staff. The things I don’t miss are all things that I was able (and happy) to leave behind, and those things will remain there in the past forever.

In honor of the two things I miss — students and staff — beyond the paywall you will find a poem I wrote in honor of the former students who passed away during my three decades of teaching and a short story about an elementary teacher who has temporarily lost his sense of humor and how he gets it back.

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