This is going to sound whiny. I promise it's not a cry for help or attention. I just needed to write down my feelings in a semipermanent way. If you're not into that, this isn't for you.
I am terrible at my job. This is, I suspect, not something that is terribly unique to me. I am sure there are many people who aren't very good at their job. I would imagine, however, that I am uniquely unqualified for mine.
I imagine that the soul-crushing weight of being terrible at my job is also somewhat unique. I am, you see, a teacher. Every day I go into work, and I try my best. I really do. I plan my lessons in advance, and try to adapt them to what the students are actually learning in my class, and actually interested in. And yet, when I look at results, I'm getting very little. This is my fault.
I know it's my fault because I'm bad at classroom management. My school is an easy school to work in. There are no gang fights, no stabbings, almost no pregnancy, no students lighting fires in class. There's a tangible reward for students, if they want it. A Pilot's license or an Aircraft Mechanic's license with endorsements for Airframe and Powerplant. And yet my class is still unruly. I know it's my fault because behavior has deteriorated over the course of the year.
I know it's my fault because, realistically, I took a job I was uniquely unqualified for. My job is to teach Spanish. I speak Spanish poorly, at best. I mess up genders, fail to make verbs agree with each other, say commands in the wrong form, and couldn't make the subjunctive work, even in the present tense, if my life literally hung in the balance.
I didn't take a single Spanish class in college.
My two students who are heritage speakers, who I started to work with at the start of the year in reading and writing in Spanish, have no reason to think I can help them. This is because my writing level in Spanish is approximately that of a poorly-educated second grader in rural Mexico. I have trouble reading La Opinión, the Spanish-language daily in LA. I feel bad that I can't help these students more, because they're both going places, and if I could give them a leg up, that would be awesome. But here we are.
How did I end up in a job I was so uniquely unqualified for? Because I suck at all of the life things that would have made it easier for me to get a job with a real interview process. (Not that teaching isn't a real job. It is, and I love doing it. It's just psychologically crushing because I suck at it.) I'm awkward and not personable, and I interview poorly.
(Now, the story grinds to a screeching halt while I explain how a person who got through the 13th-most-difficult interview process in the US interviews poorly.) TFA interviews people differently from most places. They ask you to teach a sample lesson. I did my 5 minutes on why we believe that carrots are good for your eyes, and how it was British WWII propaganda. I used to be a camp counselor, so performing bullshit anecdotes from history is my bread and butter. That shit was super easy. I imagine if you're doing mostly interviews for executive consulting, getting into teacher mode is hard.
Fortunately for me, nobody else wanted even to interview me, so I never had the opportunity to potentially fuck up my TFA process.
Why did I apply to TFA? I've always wanted to be a teacher. (Seriously, since before high school, it's been on my list.) I couldn't find a program that would train teachers in non-STEM fields, except TFA. Apparently I didn't look hard enough, because people tell me those programs exist, but I guess that's just another aspect of my profound failure to do anything with myself.
But this wasn't the only reason I applied to TFA, and decided to become a teacher.
In my second year of college, I made an appointment with the career advising service. I told them, when making the appointment, that I wanted to look into jobs in Urban Planning, and I was hoping that they could help me with that.
I got there, and the lady had clearly skimmed my resume. She had no idea what field my degree was in (Geography, I told her, so that I could do Urban fucking Planning) but she told me that since I had experience in working with kids, I should perhaps look into doing that. I politely told her that I had come to the University of Chicago to get a degree in a field I was interested in, so that I had some fucking qualifications to do something else. I love kids, and I love teaching, but I just wanted to give something else a try at that point. She said that perhaps I should consider a job managing a daycare center.
So that was that, and for the next two years the career office was approximately that helpful. I took their hint (I'm fundamentally unqualified for anything else because I couldn't afford unpaid internships) and decided to do what I knew.
I do really like children, though, so I pursued my previous desires and tried to become a teacher.
I put on TFA's application that I would be OK with teaching Spanish, which I guess was my real mistake in this process. (Other than not trying harder in math in 6th grade so that I would have been able to be good enough at math to study chemistry, which would have opened up other opportunities for me, apparently) I should have just told them to stick me with History. But I said I'd be ok with teaching Spanish, because I am full of nothing if not hubris and bullshit, and I ended up there.
I passed the credentialing test because it was a motherfucking joke.
I have nobody to blame but myself, which I think is also the story of how I've failed at everything else I've ever tried to do.
But here I am. In a job I love tremendously, which I'm terrible at because I'm unqualified for it, which brings me great joy ("Mr. O'Connell, I think I'm actually learning Spanish this time" said a student who had failed Spanish before) but also tortures me on a near-existential level.
I guess what this massive crush of word salad says, really, is that I'm bad at being a person. When I get out of TFA, I'll look for a job teaching History. If I can't find one, I'm going to go into the service. I hear they give you a sense of purpose in the Navy, and my sedentary lifestyle is leading to obesity.
