Teachers on the frontlines: An educator digs deep into her complicated relationship to teaching…
by: Charlotte Deason Robillard
When the wedding reception was in full swing and the relentless late-summer sun was beginning to set, I was relaxed and pink-cheeked with wine in hand when my table-mate asked politely what I did for work. “I’m an English teacher at a community college, I said, feeling grateful that I have one of those jobs that doesn’t require much explanation. Everyone knows, or thinks they know, what it means to be a teacher. “Ooooh!” she cooed. “Do you love it?” she asked with the implication being that a “yes” answer was a foregone conclusion. Not wanting to disappoint but also wanting to be honest, I took a long pause before saying something uninspiring but entirely true. “It’s complicated,” I responded. “It’s a good fit for me, I guess?” Then I went on to tell a story about how my husband recently pointed out that the terrible neck pain I get a few times a year isn’t timed randomly. It always comes at the end of a term of teaching. “So yeah,” I said “it’s a cool job, but I guess it does stress me out.”
The truth is, I’ve been teaching for thirteen years, and I don’t know if I’ve ever “loved” a job. It’s just not a word I’d use to describe something I wouldn’t do unless I was being paid. And I can confidently say I would not teach if I wasn’t getting paid. I know some people would, or say they would, teach without compensation. I also know that in America it’s the one job where we want people to not only do a good job, but to wax poetic about their adoration for the job despite the contempt that is hurled at them. I do like teaching college. I like it enough to do it until I retire, but I can’t tell a stranger at a wedding that I love it. Despite it being a job that doesn’t need much explanation, I’m confident that most people don’t really understand what it entails, or why it makes my neck hurt.
Not a Safe Space: Shooters & Subpar Pension
After the Umpqua Community College shooting in 2015, in which a student in Roseburg, Oregon showed up at his Writing 115 class and shot his professor and eight classmates, I started going to therapy. It’s common at my workplace for the president of the school to send out emails after national tragedies and encourage students and employees to use free counseling services. The reality is that the student counseling is almost impossible to get into (too much demand, not enough supply) and that instructors get a mere five sessions covered by insurance. Five sessions isn’t exactly life changing, and I didn’t have the money to continue, but I figured I’d take what I could get. After the shooting, it was hard for me to get out of the car when I got to campus. I had a crippling fear that one of my students would kill me. I had been teaching Writing 115 at several Oregon community colleges for three years at that point. My students were also sometimes full of rage, unpredictable, and had access to guns (this is America). In my therapy sessions, the talk quickly moved from my anxiety about getting gunned down at work to my exhaustion from my students’ trauma dumping on me relentlessly. The therapist said I had second-hand trauma from my students’ trauma, but I wasn’t so sure that was it. Or at least not all of it. Even in therapy, I felt that I had to perform altruism, emphasizing how empathetic I was towards my students’ suffering. And I was. I am. But what I felt like I couldn’t say was that I also resented my students for dumping so much trauma on me, and I resented the system for leaving teachers to deal with every injustice that our students experience and all the emotional baggage it leaves them with, despite the fact that we have no resources or training to do so. I resented that my students sometimes made me feel afraid for my life, but somehow my class was their social safety net. And most of all, I resented the fact that no one would ever do something to make us safer. Lockdown drills and news of school shootings were and continue to be ceaseless, the fabric of our existence in America.
In 2022 the shooting that I so feared finally happened at my school. Or at least for almost two hours I thought it did. I was prepping for my 10am class in the large cubicle space where all the writing and ESOL instructors work when the lockdown alarm went off. Lights flashed from the corners of the room and a robotic voice came screaming out of the loudspeakers saying there was an active shooter threat, the campus was in lockdown, and we should “RUN, FIGHT, OR HIDE.” There were specific instructions for each option, and since we’d never rehearsed running or fighting, but we had rehearsed hiding quite a lot, me and all the other people in the vicinity opted for HIDE. We went into a little conference room, which it turned out had a huge glass window with no blinds and a door with no lock. The robotic voice that was screaming through the loud speaker said to turn off the lights, close the blinds, and lock the doors. We could only do one out of three and then panic set in.
Huddled on the floor with my colleagues, we frantically tried to speculate about what was going on. Someone called their spouse. Someone googled “shooting” + the name of our college. I cried. It surprised me at first. I haven’t been through anything like that before, and I tend to be pretty calm in a crisis, but my impulse was to weep. It was pretty contained and didn’t last long. My sense of time in the room is warped, and I know we were in there for an hour and a half total, but at some point it became clear that there was no shooter on campus. Maybe it was ten minutes into it, maybe it was an hour. It felt like an hour. First we got wind that there was a shooter at the high school up the street. This induced a new panic for those with kids, but then the story changed again and there was just a shooter “in the area.” The alarm continued to blair for the full hour and half, shouting the “RUN, FIGHT, HIDE” instructions every time. But by the end of it, we’d learned that there was simply “Police activity” in the area.
When we were finally free to “resume normal activities,” it was halfway through my class meeting time. I booked it over to my classroom to see if anyone was there. The alarm had sounded about fifteen minutes before class was supposed to start and a handful of my students had gotten to the classroom early and then been stuck there alone through the whole lockdown ordeal. I was gutted that I hadn’t been there with them. They seemed shaken up and showed me that the blinds in the classroom were broken, so they had an entire wall of windows that was visible from the parking lot. Some were more flippant about the whole thing, citing a lifetime of lockdown drills throughout their school career. “Could I still read their rough draft?” they wanted to know. To them, this was just another day. I told them we didn’t have to have class if they were too shaken up, but several students wanted to stay and work on their essays. I did my best to switch gears and give them feedback on sentence structure and paragraph organization for the rest of class. So much of this job is switching from survival mode (sometimes them, sometimes me) to something that seems weirdly granular and unimportant by comparison. By the end of the day we got word that there was no active shooter at all. A man had set a car on fire, and when police showed up they shot and killed him because they thought he had a gun. He didn’t. I am still sometimes afraid when I go to campus, but it’s hard to know who to be afraid of.
A few years ago I finally started getting serious about my finances. The first step was learning about my pension plan, PERS, which stands for Public Employee Retirement System. It’s the pension plan that’s set up for public sector employees in Oregon. The specific PERS plan that applies to community college instructors is shared also with firefighters and police officers, with some key differences between the plans offered to each different vocation. Namely, everything is worse for teachers. Firefighters and police officers can retire five years earlier than teachers, they need to accrue fewer years of service in order to retire, and they get larger pension payments overall when they do retire. There’s no stated explanation for this. Bureaucratic systems seldom have to explain themselves. But to me, the explanation is self-evident: teachers are less valuable. Less money is allocated to us in our working life and in our retirement. Firefighters’ and police officers’ jobs are viewed as riskier, more important, and deserving of better benefits and pay. And it’s true that they may be more often in the line of fire. But we are certainly asked to be in that line as well, with significantly less preparation, support, or reward for it.
The Trauma
At the college where I teach, all writing instructors are required to conference one on one with their students. Depending on the term, I have fifty to seventy-five students, and if I’m teaching all writing classes, then I need to meet individually with all of my students at least once (twice if the meeting is shorter). No other department requires this, so for many students who pass through PCC, their writing instructors are the only instructors they ever connect with one on one. As a result (at least this is my theory), we have a very different relationship with our students than other instructors.
Here’s what we get: closer relationships to our students, more students who take multiple classes with us, better chances of intervening and helping when a student is having a hard time, higher likelihood of being asked to write recommendation letters. All good stuff! But, what we also get is a great deal of trauma dumping and disclosures. Any given week, my students tell me about their medical problems, their mental health diagnoses, their romantic life, their relationships with their parents, their ennui, their depression, their gender dysphoria, their suicidal ideation, their self hatred, their climate anxiety, their generalized anxiety, their social anxiety, their abusive spouse, their eating disorder, their manic episode, their misophonia, their upcoming medical procedures, their other teachers who are mean, and their hopes and dreams. The list goes on. I am honestly honored that they feel safe sharing their lives with me. Connecting with students on a personal level is one of the reasons I do love my job at times. But it is exhausting. And often it’s also deeply inappropriate, and I am in way over my head. (To be clear, I’m never asking them to share these things. I usually say something innocuous and vague like “How’s it going? How can I help you with ____ assignment?” and that’s all it takes.) In case you’re questioning my credentials to deal with this, I have a Masters of Arts in English Literature. So…absolutely no credentials to speak of.
My very first term teaching, I was initiated into this part of my job quickly and painfully when a student disclosed her sexual assault and subsequent pregnancy during our conference in response to me asking her a vague question like “how is the term going?” Fresh out of graduate school, twenty-eight years old, and probably running late for my next class, I was completely taken aback. I had barely learned how to teach in graduate school, and I certainly hadn’t learned how to counsel someone after sexual assault and an unwanted pregnancy. I think I at least knew to direct her to some resource centers, but I mostly just listened. Now this is what I’ve come to expect as a normal part of my job. I include language about mandatory reporting in my syllabus because disclosures like this are so common, and I regularly refer students to counseling, the Women’s Resource Center, and various other support services offered by the city.
One thing that happens when you become the interlocutor of choice for your students is that you learn quickly not to take any of their behavior personally. Ask a student who falls asleep every day during class if everything is okay and she will tell you that she works a night shift at a factory to support her family while they wait for her father to be granted a visa to join them from Somalia. Check in with a student who gets up constantly to leave class and answer her phone and she will burst into tears and tell you that her boyfriend was just deported and no one has heard from him since. She just wants to hear news that he’s safe, so she runs out in the hall to answer her phone every time it buzzes. Ask a student if they plan to turn in that overdue assignment and they will tell you that their mom overdosed again, and they wanted to finish their homework, but had to stay in the hospital with her all night. Can they have another day?
Television and movies about college would have us believe that students and professors are always locked in some battle over respect or laziness, and I suppose that’s sometimes the case, but overwhelmingly I find that my students’ behavior is rarely about their respect for me at all. It’s about all the other things going on in their lives besides my class. While the school where I work certainly pays lip service to offering wrap around services to help students with all these outside issues, it’s teachers who are on the frontlines, and we’re usually the only ones who are held accountable when a student does not pass a class in the midst of a life-altering trauma. At one point administrators introduced a new system of assigning classes to adjuncts in which there would be a file on each instructor and we’d be assigned points based on everything from our pass rates to how many professional development seminars we’d attended. While pass rates can be an important indicator of how an instructor is doing, I was struck that administrators didn’t take into account all the other reasons that students might fail a class — all the personal reasons that have nothing to do with the class material and everything to do with the rigors of life in America. But of course they didn’t take those things into account. Writing teachers are probably the only ones that get that information in a steady stream, straight from our students’ mouths. After all, no one else at the school is required to meet with them one on one every term in addition to seeing them multiple times a week in class and reading their writing weekly.
Of course there are so many beautiful things that come out of these relationships with students. I’m honored that they trust me and that they’re learning to advocate for themselves and express themselves. I share my lunch with them, and walk with them to the Queer Resource Center or the Student Pantry when they are too shy or nervous to go by themselves. I call the counseling office for them, and I invite them to do homework next to me in my cubicle if they don’t have somewhere quiet to study. Sometimes I get to watch them grow. Sometimes they get a scholarship to a university and reach out to me when they need a recommendation letter for graduate school. Sometimes they email me to let me know what programs they got into. Sometimes we stay in touch after they graduate and I read the writing they want to submit for publication. But sometimes they stop coming to class. They stop answering emails. They just disappear. Sometimes they never turn in a single assignment and I only hear from them on the last day of class, asking in delusional desperation if it’s possible to do all the work for the entire term in the next twenty-four hours so they don’t fail and lose their financial aid.
So you can see how sometimes it feels like this is my primary job: the interlocutor, the caretaker. But it’s not. I still have fifty to seventy-five essays to grade, two to three classes to prep and teach, and dozens of emails to answer. Sometimes I am having these conversations in the hallway on my way to another class, wondering if I will have time to pee while also wondering if I am a mandatory reporter for something this student is telling me, or if they are a suicide risk and I’ll need to submit a report after class.
We go into teaching wanting to offer something to these students. Something bigger than all of it, something that transcends the bullshit. Literature, Art, the ability to exercise and form your own thoughts, the seeds of rebellion and creativity and autonomy that start from within. This is the dream of all my friends who are educators. Despite the trope of the naive new teacher, we are not naive going into it. We know things will be hard. But we also know what radicalized us. We know what gave us an escape. We know that our minds are the only thing they can’t take from us, and we want to impress this upon the next generation. But every day we have to cry some. Because this shit is hard, and we know it will never get easier, just more familiar.
All of this is why it’s hard for me to say breezily that I love teaching. I do love it at times. It demands all of me, and it gives me many beautiful and meaningful things in return. But it also exhausts me, and frightens me, and leaves me needing to come up for air every ten weeks, my neck aching with the weight of it all.
Charlotte Deason Robillard is an educator, writer, and ceramic artist living in Portland, Oregon. Her writing explores art, fashion, philosophy, education, and the everyday habits that make us human. She holds an MA in English Literature from Portland State University and teaches writing and English classes at Portland Community College. Her ceramics are available on her website, punctuationceramics.
