S3: The Teachers Are Not Alright

Like many teachers, when Kristen started her career at 22, she was hopeful and excited. She loved working with students with special needs, and loved learning how their brains worked. But over the years, the job became harder and harder because of the lack of support she received. Eventually, all of the small moments of feeling left out to dry led to a falling out with this career she loved.

Originally Published August 28, 2023

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

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Um, how are you? Most people answer that question with fine or good. But obviously, it’s not always fine and it’s usually not even that good.

This is a podcast that asks people to be honest about their pain. To just be honest about how they really feel. About the hard parts of life.

And guess what, it’s complicated.

It’s a weird time to be a teacher.

First of all, I have been teaching for the last seven years at a Title I school, where damn near all of our students have trauma and socioeconomic factors that are barriers to their learning, and in so many ways barriers to their functioning in these

spaces. And all of that said, I love our students so much. It is heartbreaking sometimes to see the deck stacked against them.

I taught second grade and third grade, and both of the years that I taught second grade, I had a student die on my roster. My first student passed of an asthma attack.

I carried him up three flights of stairs to the nurse in front of my other students, and I was 22 years old. The second child was killed in a drive-by shooting. She was killed with her dad.

She was in the back of his truck. I remember holding my breath, as we all do, all of this, my educator friends, in a city such as ours, where the crime and the gun violence is so high.

It’s dangerous right now for queer people, for transgender people. It’s dangerous right now for teachers to express their support almost in that department. And so I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t kind of scared to do this.

I’m still going to, because I know that it’s the right thing to do.

You had to be on 100% of the time.

It also felt like no work-life balance at all, because all of that quote free time that everybody who is not adjacent or in the field of education claims that teachers have is actually spent worrying about teaching, grading assignments, and then

There’s an underlying judgment and labeling of struggling teachers as underperforming instead of just needing support.

I call it the I Heard Movement. I heard things about that teacher, I heard things about this teacher, and then drawing conclusions.

There simply isn’t the trust that we are the professionals in the room, and the support from the community to back it up. The ones that make it for the long haul can compartmentalize, adapt, or simply be okay with not being okay.

It’s 2023. Do you know where your kids’ teachers are? They might be crying in their car.

They might be looking to leave the field entirely if they haven’t already. Because, by and large, teachers are not okay. Teaching has always been a challenging job, and that’s why we often say that it’s a calling to the people who do it.

Because anything that is deeply meaningful also has its own set of challenges. Today, you’re going to meet a teacher who finally decided it was all too much.

It’s upsetting, and it’s kind of scary to me, especially because I have young children in the public education system. You know, what’s going to become of our system?

But first, let’s rewind to 2004. Yeah by Usher is on everyone’s radio. A new online platform called the Facebook has just launched.

And Kristen is walking into a high school in suburban Missouri for her first day of school as a teacher. She’s 22 years old with little life experience and even less teaching experience.

I end up with my first classroom without doing any student teaching. I think I had like a two week like crash course, like, hey, you’re about to start teaching. Here’s everything you need to know before you start.

If Kristen had studied education in college, she would have spent a semester student teaching, where she would shadow an experienced teacher, observe them, practice her skills.

But Kristen was a communications major. She got interested in teaching after graduation, when she needed a job and picked up work as a substitute.

That led to work in a special education classroom as a para professional, which is an assistant to the teacher. That para job showed Kristen that she wanted to be a special education teacher herself.

So she signed up to take night classes to get her teaching license. But a local high school hired her to teach while she completed the courses to get that teaching license. So on this first day of school, in 2004, Kristen is walking into the unknown.

She’s 22, wearing a pair of kitten heels, an ironed blouse, a pencil skirt, and hair that is stick-straight and probably crispy from her flat iron. And she was so excited.

My first classroom was reading. It was reading all day long. And it was some special needs students.

And then there was some reg ed students who were just kind of behind on reading. And it was high school.

Pretty quickly, Kristen realizes that her experience as a para is not enough.

I walked in, and I had a kid throw in a chair in my room and call me a bitch. And all I wanted him to do was read out loud or something. I think I just was shocked all the time, like just, well, what’s wrong with these kids?

And these kids are so mean to me. And I did a lot of yelling. And I was teaching by yelling a lot, because I didn’t know how to get to control my classroom.

I didn’t know how to lead them.

I also don’t know how you lead a group of kids who are throwing chairs. But Kristen is 22, and she is drowning. She needs help.

Months roll by like this, where every day feels like total chaos. And after winter break, help does arrive.

The district I started in had instructional coaches. So it’s like a teacher coach. I had two women.

One was a special education instructional coach, and one was just a reading instructional coach. And these women would come in and they would watch me teach a lesson.

And they would give me a bunch of notes on like, here’s what went well, here’s what you need to improve. They get up and they teach a lesson in my room.

And I would watch them and how they would model how to get the content out or how to create a bond with a student. And I remember the best advice I got during this time was, you cannot communicate with these students by yelling at them.

Like they’re not listening. And I’m like, well, I don’t know how to get their attention. And she said, you have to calm yourself down.

And your voice, you need to be talking like you and I are talking right now. And if you are too stressed out and you’re screaming, you need to step away and figure out how to calm down.

And if you’re modeling for them that screaming is how you get your point across, they’re going to do the same. So make sure, like, let’s just calm it down a little bit. You know, these women came and saved my life.

They didn’t help me. Like, they saved me. I was going to bail.

Like, I was, I couldn’t do it. They were just like, just hang with us for a little bit. Let’s get you through the first school year, and then you can kind of decide if you want to keep going or not.

So Kristen stuck with it, and she was able to make it to the last day of school.

By then, she felt more confident as a teacher, thanks to help from those coaches.

It started white knuckled, screaming my way through it. And then, thankfully, these women came, and they helped me to learn how to basically do my job well. And this is a position that was phased out later by this district.

And I’ve been in three districts, and this is the only district I’ve been in where they had this position.

Kristen’s experience with these coaches was rare. Not many first-year teachers get that kind of one-on-one instruction on how to be a good teacher. Kristen got that support her first year.

But as her career progressed, there would be more times where she found herself once again drowning, hoping someone, anyone, would throw down a life preserver. And it seems like a lot of people in education are drowning these days.

The same issues that teachers have always had are still a problem. Lack of funding from state legislatures, low pay. But we’re also in a particularly tense time in education.

The pandemic put an enormous strain on teachers who had to try to teach and connect with their students virtually. It wasn’t just enough to be a teacher, you now also had to have all the skills of a YouTuber.

And we’re also at a moment where schools are the epicenter of many political battles.

This year, Black History Month is unfolding alongside a coordinated effort across the country to limit the teaching of race and racism.

Critical Race Theory, or CRT for short, is not taught in K-12 schools, but it’s nonetheless become the latest flashpoint in the country’s culture wars. From school boards to state houses.

Since the start of last year, more than half of all states have introduced bills banning the teaching of CRT in public schools.

In September, the Flagler County School Board voted to remove four books from the shelves of Jack’s High School, all of them dealing with anti-racism and LGBTQ plus issues. It’s not just here in Florida.

Across the country, school districts are removing books from their curriculums and libraries at a record pace, saying they’re harmful to children.

And of course, teachers of this generation are leading kids through multiplication drills and active shooter drills. They’re teaching kids how to react and thinking about how they would react if the unthinkable happens. And it happens a lot.

All of this is weighing on educators. A 2022 survey from the Rand Corporation found that 60% of teachers reported feeling burned out. A third of teachers reported feeling depressed.

The tape we played at the top of the show was from teachers we talked to all over the country. We did a call out over on Instagram asking teachers what it’s like to teach right now.

Some of them, as you heard, shared why they left, but they all said the same thing about what makes them stay or what made them sad to leave—the kids. When our teachers are suffering, they can’t focus on the kids.

The students and the teachers deserve more. Teaching is a job that is absolutely necessary, and it is also a job that demands simply too much from teachers.

For Kristen, like many other educators who exist in this reality, eventually all of it would become too much. Kristen was not a little girl who played school with her friends.

She wasn’t the kid in class who looked at the teacher and imagined herself at the front of the room. Kristen was a little girl who loved the human brain.

I used to tell my parents I wanted to be a brain surgeon. But I found that it’s really intriguing to me to learn about disability and how it affects learning and how it affects the processing of information and behavior as well.

Growing up, Kristen’s next door neighbor was a kid with intellectual disabilities.

I used to babysit him off and on. And he had some severe behaviors and he was nonverbal. And his way of going through life was really, really intriguing to me.

What he would eat, what he would not eat, how he interacted with his little sister, how he interacted with his little sister’s friends. He could sit and watch trains for a half of a day and not get up once.

Just watching him and being around him was really, really fun for me. And I did get paid to babysit him even though I would have done it for free. Eventually, in high school, started getting involved with coaching, Special Olympics again.

It’s just fun. It’s just fun. Just being close to these kids and seeing how they process life and overcoming their challenges was also inspiring to me.

So when Kristen graduated high school, she thought maybe teaching special ed would be a good fit.

My parents are very high achieving professionals.

It kind of came from nothing. My mom built up a really great dental practice in our area. My dad was a financial advisor.

And basically, they had pretty high expectations for my sisters and myself. And they, you know, mom was like, well, you’re just, you won’t make any money. Like it’s not a good profession to go into.

So that’s why Kristen gets a communication degree.

But after graduation, she gravitates to schools and eventually accepts her childhood passion of working with students with special needs. She has that very challenging first year in the classroom.

But again, those instructional coaches were essential to keeping her in the profession.

And then my second year of teaching was like one of my favorite years that I ever had. Because I had the experience to, you know, figure out like, oh, proximity is a way to get attention.

So when I see a kid is starting to doze off, I’m just going to go stand by them and teach from that location for a little bit until they kind of sit up straight, you know, just little tricks like that. And I was back into my same content.

But by that point, you know, the script, I had, I started to memorize it a little bit. So, you know, I kind of knew what was going to come next with my content that I was teaching every day.

And then I could start to also kind of relax a little bit and pull in a little bit of other things that I wanted to into the classroom. So I didn’t have to just like teach from this one script, from this one curriculum.

You know, as you get better at your job, you relax a little bit more and you kind of start to look around. And you’re like, oh, I could pull this in because this is what’s going on in the news. And this, they’re talking about it.

And this can apply to whatever, you know, reading comprehension lesson we have for the day. It really, I think that’s when it clicked like, oh, this is a job that I can do and I can do it well and I can have fun at it.

One of the things that really clicks that second year is Kristen’s perception of her students. As a special ed teacher, Kristen spends a lot of time focusing on how to help that student overcome their challenges in the classroom.

But in that second year, Kristen starts to see that her students are bringing a lot to the classroom that has nothing to do with their disability and everything to do with the world they live in outside of the classroom.

You kind of earmark kids when you first start the school year, like, oh, this one’s going to be a problem, or I’m going to have to spend some extra time with this one, or this one’s coming in with a lot of baggage and it’s going to affect what’s

going on, or this one’s just chatty. So as you go on, then you get better at meeting those kids where they are and getting to really appreciate their quirks.

Like the one who called me a bitch and threw a chair because I wanted him to read, like I had the biggest heart for him by the end of that school year. And I ended up having him again the next year.

I got to know him better and he’d start to talk a little bit about his home life. And I had a lot of questions because it didn’t seem stable. But you could tell he was coached very well on what to share and what not to share.

And we had a lot of concerns as a building. And then you build up a lot of like empathy for the kid, you know, and I still think about him today. Like, I wonder how he’s doing.

It’s about 20 years ago now. So some people stay away from special education because they think all the kids are complex and awful and big behavior challenges. And it’s just not the case.

You know, they’re just really just kids trying to get through school. And it’s a little bit difficult for them in certain areas for certain reasons.

But, you know, when you finally get your legs under you and you sit down and you have the conversations with the kids, then you start to connect with them and you’re like, oh, this is, you know, you’re actually why I’m getting up every day to come to

Three years into teaching, Kristen needs a change.

She feels like she’s got her sea legs under her, and now she wants to work in a new area of special ed.

So I ended up leaving that district that was very supportive and coached me up, and that’s kind of was their reputation in the city, was like they coach up young teachers, and then those young teachers go off for other districts.

I wanted to teach a different classroom in special ed. I wanted to teach life skills.

Life skills is a class that teaches students skills that will hopefully allow them to live independently in their community. Life skills classes can include practical things like cooking, maintaining good hygiene, or how to use public transportation.

Life skills teachers can also work with students on social skills like maintaining friendships and being a part of your community. So Kristen starts applying and is offered a new job in a neighboring district to run a life skills classroom.

But in this new district, new teachers like Kristen are treated very differently.

When Kristen arrives at her new school, she is surprised at how different the environment is.

I saw teachers in my new district get penalized and get put on what’s called a PIPs, professional improvement plans, for really kind of like what I deem to be honest mistakes in the classroom as a new teacher.

So I kind of am looking around, talking to my department mates and these new teachers. There was one in particular who I thought was a great new teacher. Now granted, did I spend all day like observing her in her room?

No. But like I overheard her questions in department meetings and she seemed to really have a passion for the position and for the school. And, you know, I would kind of dip in sometimes and see her.

And she seemed like a great teacher to me, but she was really embarrassed because her first year she got put on a PIP and I saw struggle in places that I hadn’t really seen it before.

And it’s new people, again, trying to start out, they’re trying to do a good job. And, you know, teachers are so much like students. Like we need affirmation.

We need to be met where we are. And we want to, you know, feel like we’re being valuable in some way. And if Admin is not able to treat us and give us what we are expected to give our students, the disconnect is so huge.

Like it’s just it’s bad all around.

I want to spend a few moments understanding Kristen’s job. Because a special education teacher is doing something very different than a classroom teacher.

Yes, Kristen’s teaching her students some of the same material that all students learn, but she also has to tailor that learning to each student’s individual needs.

And every child receiving special education services in the United States is required to have a legal document called an IEP.

So an IEP is an Individualized Education Plan. So for a student to receive special services in a school district, and it might be the special services might be something just like speech. It could be occupational therapy.

And it could be more of what I saw on my classroom. So I taught life skills, which was usually a lower functioning special education student. So like I’d see intellectual disabled, intellectually disabled.

And so because of that diagnosis, then I’d be able to provide programming.

So like as the IEP team would sit down, and that would include parents, it’d include if that student had a regular education teacher, it would include principal, counselor, school psychologist, who probably diagnosed that student.

And we kind of talk about well, what is the programming need to look like? What classes does this student need? What goals, what academic goals, or even functional goals do we need?

Does a student just need help like navigating the building by him or herself? That could be a goal in an IEP. You could just pull out like reading comprehension goals.

And so it’s a huge document. You have accommodations, modifications for the classes. You have to talk about state testing in this document.

You have to talk about a transition plan, like what are we prepping the student when they leave high school to be able to do.

It’s a lot of just documenting, you know, just very comprehensively, what is this school doing for this student to serve them with their disability.

Part of Kristen’s job was not only providing those accommodations herself, but also making sure that if a student went to a non-special ed classroom, that the teachers knew about those accommodations.

And making sure all of the accommodations are met is very important because an IEP is a legal document, and teachers have to treat it like a contract between the school and the student.

I will say, usually in a special ed classroom, you are kind of naturally providing individual accommodations, modifications.

A lot of times, though, when that student goes to a regular education class, that’s where you really got to work with that reg ed teacher to be like, hey, so-and-so is coming to you and they have like 30 accommodations that you need to meet.

And then you usually see the reg ed teachers face like, what now? And so then I’d have to kind of try to coach, like, okay, so here’s what it looks like.

And a lot of times I would send para support with that student so that they have an adult, but sometimes they don’t have that. So a lot of times, you know, I’m trying to coach the student like, hey, if there’s a test, we can read the test to you.

That’s an accommodation you have. So you need to tell me on test day and we need to make plans so you can come out to me so we can read the test in a separate location. You know, and it can be something like that.

It can be something like this student just needs proximity. They need a teacher next to them, prompting sometimes it’s positive reinforcement. You know, a student needs to know they’re on the right track.

A lot of it is like they’re kind of pre-filled, like you can kind of choose from a bank, but then you can also completely make up your own too. You can write in your own.

If the IEP team gets together and they’re like, okay, this is weird, but like this student really needs to be sitting on a beanbag chair in the front of the room holding a clipboard.

And that for some reason that student can lock in at that point and they can learn. So you would need to type that into this document, which is legal.

So a lot of times it’s something like I might notice that accommodation is not being met because I maybe have a para in that class who’s noticing the teacher’s not doing it. So then I’d have a bunch of conversations back and forth.

Sometimes I would have to alert parents. But if the teacher’s just flat out refusing, that teacher then could be put on a PIP because they’re refusing to fall into place with the special education plan.

The parents could have legal action too, which most districts have their own lawyers and they have to be very well versed in are we not providing what we say we will in this document.

And if you are not, that parent would absolutely have the right to a lawsuit pretty quickly.

This feels so overwhelming to me, just as a listener. This part is not necessarily teaching, it’s project management and it’s also contract compliance.

The stakes are very high when you’re working with students in special ed because the educators need to ensure that the kids are getting the services they need. Kristen is 25 at this point, still fairly new to her career.

She’s the liaison between the parents of these kids, and she has to communicate this kid’s IEP to other teachers and paras. If you are overwhelmed hearing this, imagine how it felt living it.

On a busy week, be there 50 hours or more a week, maybe 60 at the most. A lot of that was my paperwork.

I could not do it during the school day, so to keep up with the special education paperwork, I had to do that after school, and when you’re learning how to do it as you do it, it is very time-consuming.

Now, at the time, of course, I’m early 20s, I don’t have a family, and there’s a lot of young teachers around too. In some ways, it was fun. It’s like hang out, talk, swap crazy stories from the day, get some work done.

Sometimes, we’d go out drinking too. We drink a lot. The young teachers in the building, it was like, well, where are we drinking this Friday?

Or what are we doing? It’s Wednesday and I had a hard day, let’s go grab something to drink. So it became socially important for me as well.

I knew I was working a lot and I knew sometimes I come home at three o’clock in the afternoon or four o’clock, and I’d fall asleep on the couch watching TV before dinner and I wouldn’t wake up till eight and I’d be like, wow, I’m really tired.

But again, like it was just me that I had to take care of.

Any of us who have been in our 20s and tried to prove ourselves in a career know exactly what Kristen means by taking care of herself.

She means eating takeout, forgetting to exercise and letting the stress just rip through her body, waking up in a pool of sweat from stress dreams.

And that worked until it didn’t, because seven years into her career, Kristen meets her now husband and they get married and they started talking about having kids.

Unfortunately, with special education and life skills, you can get pretty severe behaviors and it can become very dangerous.

So the first time I left, I was noticing the student in the room next door was physically assaulting the teacher a lot and there didn’t really seem to be a great behavior plan in place to stop that or correct that.

So I was thinking of getting pregnant and the student was supposed to come up to me the next year and I had just had a really, really hard time getting a very physically aggressive student moved to the correct placement in my district.

Now they actually had a behavior program where this student that I had was a better fit, but it took me the whole school year to get her moved over there.

So that really burned me down to the ground and like I was just like I don’t want my pregnancy to be this amount of stress where I’m worried about my physical being, but these kids were, some of them had a hundred pounds on me easy.

So the amount of stress you have when you’re trying to first of all just teach, trying to get content out, but you’re also trying to protect yourself and your students who have disabilities who have processing delays.

So a lot of the time, it’s really stressful to try to get kids to safety when a student is escalating and being physical. So just that amount of stress that you would have on a daily coming in.

So I left to go start my own tutoring company and then I found out real quick, I did not want to be a business owner. So I took a couple of years off.

I actually went and worked for my dad for a little bit because I thought maybe I could do what he does. He’s a financial advisor and I absolutely could not do what he does. Not at all.

So Kristen learns financial advising and running a business were not for her, but this time away from the classroom was very important because this is when Kristen got pregnant and gave birth to her two kids.

And once those kids got a little older, Kristen started thinking about her students again and what it would be like to get back to the classroom.

When Kristen returns to teaching after having her kids, she knows things have to be different.

With two small children, she can’t be working 60 hours a week and stressing herself out, so she tries to find a job that will fit this new phase of her life.

Kristen gets a job as a life skills teacher in the same school district where her kids go, so they’ll all be on the same schedule. And she sets boundaries.

I just decided I have to protect my own personal time, so I became a contract time teacher. And it became, if I don’t get it done during my contract time, it’s not going to happen.

And, you know, my last year, I, for the first time ever, I would get emails from the district like, hey, you’re behind on this and you’re behind on that. I’d say, I understand.

I’ve asked you guys to support me by giving me a paperwork day where I get to have a substitute teacher. Now, granted, that’s more planning for me because I’d have to put in subplans.

But then I could go sit in a small office somewhere and I could just crank out that paperwork without being distracted and they wouldn’t provide it for me. So I was like, you’re going to have late paperwork.

Now, would I have done that as an early teacher? Absolutely not.

But she’s doing it and we are proud of her for setting her boundaries and speaking up for what she needs. Now, does that mean the school understood the boundaries? Not always.

Did it mean the school always respected those boundaries? Definitely not. But Kristen had let go of the guilt.

She had more work to do than she had hours in the day. And she wasn’t willing to sacrifice time with her kids or her husband or even just herself for the sake of paperwork deadlines.

But even with a new mindset, Kristen realized being a special education teacher was still so challenging. In May of 2022, after Kristen had been back in the classroom for a little while, things start to unravel.

So I lost a co-teacher and I lost about six paras. And they were leaving because they kind of saw what was coming because my program was blowing up. We were getting about 14 new students, all boys.

And we needed to hire about 10 or 12 paras. And I needed two new co-teachers. And I was going to be one of two returning people in the program.

And the reason I stayed is because I had someone in my department, you know, I was telling him, I’m like, I think I got to go to, like, I just don’t think I’m up for this.

And he’s like, listen, you could really dig in and you could build up this program exactly the way you want it. Did you ever think of that? And I’m like, oh, I didn’t.

I like to be bossy. I like to be in control of things, maybe. So I’m like, yep, you know what, I’m going to come back.

I’m going to be the hero of the year and try to get all these new people settled in and I’m going to lead professional developments for the paras and we’re going to have a great little family down here and all these new kids is going to be, it’ll be

tough, but I’m going to be the person. I’m going to be the lady in charge down here.

Even though Kristen is excited to be in charge of the Life Skills program, she’s not naive about what that means. 14 new students means 14 IEPs she needs to learn.

And she has no idea what each student’s disability looks like and how best to manage it. And she has to figure all of this out with a new staff.

I came back this last school year and I came back knowing it was going to be probably my most difficult school year ever. But I was up for it because I really, really cared about this population of students.

And I really wanted the building to be great. I wanted to stay here very badly. I didn’t want to change again.

I was really tired of changing classrooms. So we show up, our classrooms have been remodeled, but we have no furniture. And so I have a new co-teacher.

And then I have next to me, a substitute co-teacher who’s filling in because that new co-teacher who had been hired was out on maternity leave. So I got those two new people. The para-situation, it fluctuated.

Sometimes we’d have 12 on staff, sometimes we’d have 10, like it was just up and down the whole time. So I had all these new people, new kids coming in and no furniture.

We had to like beg to get some old furniture back into our space because the new furniture we ordered wasn’t in. And the new thing that they had put in, in the classroom that was two doors down from me. So it’s still part of my program.

It used to be called a safe room and that’s kind of what I used to call it and that’s what I’m going to call it. But it’s a room, it’s got padded walls.

You put a student in who’s maybe super aggressive attacking other people, maybe destroying a classroom. And the idea is you put them in this room and you close the door and there’s a button on the outside that locks the door from the outside.

And so you have to hold down that lock in order for the door to stay locked. And when we showed up on the first day of school, and by this point, we’d been in meetings for about a week.

So we were watching this room and it was not fully built out yet. We kept asking, when is this going to be done?

Like first day of school, my assistant principal, he had to move a bandsaw out of that room before the first day of school started because there was still construction equipment in it. And again, like I’ve got a brand new teacher in that classroom.

She’s a first year teacher. I’m actually assigned as her mentor and she’s just looking at me like, what is going on here? And I’m like, I don’t know.

I’m trying to apologize even though it’s not my fault. Like we’ll get it figured out. So we’ve got, now we have a room, but it has no door on it.

So sure enough, first day of school starts and there’s severe behaviors right off the bat. And in that classroom, there’s maybe four or five kids tops. So you have to have really low numbers if there’s kind of a severe behavior room kind of deal.

You don’t want a full classroom. And we had no door. And so we’re having to like blockade kids in this door using like bean bags.

And my admin did come down and he would help with the bean bag barricade. And it was so unsafe and so insane because the kid would be pushing out, trying to get out through the bean bags.

And these aren’t like three-year-olds.

Right. Let’s emphasize high school children, which I mean, some of them are basically full grown adult size. Our one guy who used utilized it the most, I would say 6’2, probably 180, maybe 190 and really fast.

So you were in trouble if he got out the door because no one could catch up to him. You’d have to get in a car to track him down. Like he was just so fast.

And life skills, by the way, it tends to be women. And it tends to be, the parents tend to be older people. That’s just who gets pulled to these jobs.

So we have that going on and we’re still begging, like, can we get a fucking door on here, guys? Like on top of that, we also had a student who was medically fragile and would have seizures all day on the floor. He was blind.

He was deaf. He could not move himself out of the way.

Now, watching someone have a seizure is very traumatic. They are completely helpless, and if you’re watching it, you are too, pretty much.

Kristen is in charge of keeping this child safe while also keeping the kid who is lashing out safe, but also keeping her other students safe from that child. All the while, she’s trying to teach the new parents how to handle these situations.

It’s physically and mentally exhausting.

That student who was seizing had a really great one-on-one parent. She would map and write down how long each seizure was, and she really took really good impressive notes because he had these really, really difficult medical needs.

She’d look up at me with these big brown eyes and be like, the seizures are this long, or it looks like he hadn’t been breathing for this long. Should we call an ambulance? And I’d be like, I don’t know.

My degree is in special education. I should not have to answer these questions. Let’s get the nurse down here.

And we were all just, we were just stressed. The stress was, you could probably smell the stress in that program. And then I’d pop down to my classroom and go try to teach how to cook a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch.

It was nuts.

And it was nuts because Kristen was starting to wonder if either of these students even belonged in her classroom.

Many big school districts, like the one she was in, have special programs for kids with severe medical needs or who have a lot of aggressive behaviors. And Kristen asked for help from her school’s administration.

They were so hands-off and so just, we would email and email and ask for admin help with, you know, some pretty severe para issues we were having. And like no one would respond.

And it’s just, you know, we were putting in an email, like, hey, this is dangerous. This person is not doing their job. The student is, you know, very, very aggressive and they’re doing nothing to prevent it.

Like, you know, we’d say things like this can be prevented, but we need an admin to come talk. And like they were so hands-off. It was just, we probably asked 15, 20 times before someone would come down and have a simple conversation.

Kristen said you could probably smell the stress between her and her colleagues.

That is such a visceral way to describe that feeling, and it’s unlike any job I’ve ever had. Something we say here on our team when things get overwhelming is that we are just making podcasts.

Because nobody’s life is in danger if the story structure of an episode is eh, or no one’s physical body is in harm if we forget to mix the audio to negative 16 luffs. But that’s exactly what Kristen has to worry about.

She’s responsible for the health and wellness of these children with disabilities, and things are starting to spin out of control in her mind.

Two summers ago, I worked really, really hard with a therapist and a psychiatrist to wean myself off of antidepressants.

I had been on them for a really crazy family thing that happened and it triggered depression, which I’d never had dealt with before, so I’d been on it for a couple of years, and I really wanted off.

I was really proud of the work I’d done in the summer leading up to the school year. Okay, I’m back off. My brain chemistry feels really good.

I would say by mid-September, I was calling the psychiatrist and my therapist, like I got to get back on. I can’t.

The stress level, the anger level, being put in this position, you know, and also like trying to transition 14 new kids in the building. I would just come home and just have to lay down. Like I couldn’t really do much for my health.

Now, another crazy batshit thing I put myself through, I’d had surgery over the summer on my Achilles tendon. So, I was in a boot. I was healing from this surgery and it was not going well.

I ended up getting blood clots as a result of this surgery. And I couldn’t walk. I was in pain a lot.

Even if I got 10 hours of sleep, I wake up exhausted. I was short tempered. I was at home.

I couldn’t really do much. Like kids are doing sports. My husband’s running them around.

He’s cooking dinner. I’m just kind of laying catatonic at home. Kind of dreading what’s coming the next day, you know?

And then again, like having to get right back on the antidepressants, which was really upsetting for me. But I at that point knew like if I’m going to get out of bed and keep showing up to this job, like I have to medicate.

I have to get my chemistry leveled out. The district eventually moved the medically fragile student to a medically fragile program. So he did leave our building.

And we did have our most severe student go to a behavior program where he belonged. Now, the issue was it took a lot, a lot of documentation and us really, really pushing for these things to happen.

It wasn’t like a supervisor came in and was like, oh, this is all bad. Let me help you guys. It was more like we tell them what we think is wrong and what we think needs to be done.

And then there would be a big, huge dialogue about why that’s probably not correct from their perspective even though they’re not down there every day. So you get really, really, really worn down and really pissed off.

Even when the kids get moved to the appropriate place, you are at that point are so upset that this was happening to you daily and the district seemed fine with it. And there’s no apologies for anything.

Don’t expect an apology like, we’re sorry we loaded you guys like this. This was crazy. No one’s ever going to apologize.

Sorry we started you with a band saw in the safe room. That was crazy. Nope, not one person owned up to why that happened.

Like they just keep it moving. So even though the leadership, the issues are glaring, they’re never gonna own up to doing us dirty and having us start our year like that.

What the school did do was bring in a counselor for the special education teachers to talk to. Kristen encouraged the staff that worked under her to go, to take them up on it, to talk to these professionals.

They’d come up all red-faced, sobbing, and then they’d have to go back to work. The kids just didn’t piece out for the day, and thought, oh, it’s a mental health day. We still had to do our job.

So I make sure I go down last. And again, at this point, I already have my psychiatrist. I’ve got my therapist, so I feel good about.

But I’m just kind of curious, like, hey, how did this go today? And she, this woman, is looking at me like, wide-eyed, and I go, how was it?

She’s like, well, what you guys are going through, and she’s using words like, you know, trauma, like group trauma, and she’s, you know, could have filed lawsuits if you guys want, this is unsafe, you’re not getting support.

By February 2023, there aren’t enough antidepressants to make this job tenable for Kristen.

I emailed my admin, like, hey, I’m going to resign, where’s the letter to sign off? Here it is. No one asked me why.

No one asked me if, you know, I can reconsider for any reason.

There’s no exit interview, I assume.

No. The most I got, I turned in my keys to my head principal on the last day of school, and all she did was ask, what are you going to do next? But she wasn’t even really that interested.

She was like typing on her computer, and I should have said like, I’m going to go to Disney World and be Mickey Mouse. She was not paying attention.

I made friends with one admin who was not over me, and he said that their admin team would talk about what was going on in the program. There was just a lot of like hand wringing, and like we just don’t know how to help them well.

So they kind of, I think, just knew it was going to be a really hard year, and they were fine with it, and they’re fine with losing me in the mix, because maybe they assumed it was just too hard of a gig. Maybe, I don’t know.

They could also be happy I’m leaving. Maybe I’m a pain in the ass. I don’t know.

No one ever told me I was, but again, that would require someone to sit down and have like a conversation, and that didn’t happen.

In 2004, Kristen showed up for her first day of teaching, totally unprepared for what the day or this career would bring. But she was hopeful, and she was excited. Nearly 20 years later, it’s Kristen’s last day of school.

She walks into school that day, exhausted, disappointed, and ready to say goodbye to her career as an educator.

I started the day in the hallway with another para who was leaving as well, and she was asking if I was emotional, and I’m like, you know what, I’ve not been emotional at all. I just know this is the right move for me. I got to get out of here.

I don’t think I’m going to cry at all today. And then jump cut to like five minutes later, I have a student handing me a card, and this student, he pasted on a fake mustache all year, like sticky tape on it, and it actually looked really good on him.

He’d peel it off, and while he ate, he’d set it on the tables at the cafeteria, and he’d eat his lunch and then he’d stick it back on. So he walks up and hands me a card, and he’s pretty monotone, here you are, Ms. Plater.

Okay, thanks. And so then I open it, and it’s just, it’s a really cute kind of generic card, but he hand wrote, thank you for helping me this year, Mrs. Plater.

And that was it. I was Waterworks from that moment on, and I didn’t stop. The sweet people in my program who, again, we were down in the trenches, we really bonded.

These sweet people put together a goodbye video with the kids saying hilarious, sweet things about me. And we had a bunch of food, and the video was like, what did you like about Mrs. Plater?

And some of the answers were off the wall, like, well, she loves butterflies. And it’s like, I don’t love butterflies. Why are you saying I love butterflies?

It’s because that student had a butterfly on that day. But some of them would say like, I was funny, or we had a good time cooking. I ran a car detailing shop with the kids.

So like some of them would talk about cleaning cars out and playing music. And like, there were a lot of sweet memories like that. And they all say goodbye on the video.

And I got like this giant gift basket. And we had a huge breakfast. And I just, I sobbed through the whole thing.

And I mean, it was surreal. It was a day I will not forget. It was really a great day.

By now, you can probably hear how much Kristen loved her students.

Even with the kids who had severe needs, helping them didn’t stress her out. That’s part of the job. The thing that drove her out of the classroom was the lack of resources to help those kids.

Kristen’s story is unique because it is hers. But for anyone in education, this story of a teacher joining the profession because they love working with kids and slowly being beaten down by the demands of the job is also a very familiar story.

Teachers everywhere are burned out, underpaid, and don’t feel supported. And there’s not one thing any of us can do to fix it. Unless you are a legislator.

Then you can really swing your weight around. But if you are not an elected official, do you know what you can do? You can give your time to helping out.

Ask your kid’s teacher what they need. Money? Supplies?

Maybe they need you to speak up on their behalf at a school board meeting. They definitely need you to vote in school board elections. Pay attention to your local elections.

If you aren’t a parent, look up the school in your neighborhood and donate to their PTA. Volunteer once a month at a school with low parent involvement. Because, honestly, being able to volunteer at your kid’s school is a privilege.

It takes time. Time is money. I hate saying it, but it’s true.

We can all support public education and try to help educators carry this burden. The teachers may not be all right, but they shouldn’t feel like they’re alone.

I hope it gets better. And I hope that the generation coming up under us is able to make sense of the mess that we’re leaving behind for them. So, I appreciate all of my teacher friends in the trenches.

Thank you for giving me a space to talk.

Thank you so much to Kristen for sharing your story with us in this episode. And thank you to every other teacher who called in, who wrote in, who shared their stories with us.

This week, over on TTFA Premium, we have the story of another teacher, Aaron Case. Aaron was the Texas Teacher of the Year in 2018, and after winning the award, he quit.

It was a constant reminder when I was tasked with something big, that he’s got it, or oh, he can’t mess this up, or whatever, because I’ve achieved this thing.

And so the pressure was there to outdo what I did, or to take on more, or to have, I called it adults in suits every time it happened, but there would be groups of five or six people that would just show up in my room during a lesson.

You can join TTFA Premium in two ways. You can sign up in your Apple Podcast app. Joining an Apple, I think, is the best option for people who really just want ad-free episodes and bonus episodes, no muss, no fuss.

Very simple, you just push a button. If you want to chat with other terribles, if you want to sometimes see our faces in video content, you can also join our new Patreon community, which gets you all the same things that you get on Apple Plus.

Here’s what I like about the Patreon. We were able to organize over 200 of our episodes by theme, by theme. So when you say, is there an episode about XYZ, we can say, mm-hmm, you can find it easily over on Patreon.

I’m also excited about Patreon because it’s a way to actually talk with you, connect with you. We have a link to that in our show notes, but also if you have the Patreon app, you can just find us there. Always check out our show descriptions.

That’s where you can get links to our email, tour dates when they’re up. Terrible Thanks For Asking is an independent production. We are made by the team at Feelings & Co, which is the same exact team that you hear about at TTFA.

The team is me, Nora McInerny, Claire McInerny, Marcel Malekebu, Jordan Hergen, Megan Palmer, and Michelle Planton.

Feelings & Co also produces The Terrible Reading Club, which is a show where I talk with authors about their work and also provide book recommendations.

It’s a ton of fun, and we have It’s Going to Be Okay, which is a daily show that brings you one small thing every day, just one small thing, one okay thing to make you feel okay for the day. It’s the opposite of a doom scroll.

You can find all our work in our amazing store. We have the best stuff, best stickers, best prints for your house, best t-shirts in the world, according to me, at feelingsand.co.

There’s no way we could have possibly included every teacher’s story, so if you have another one that you would like to share with us, you can go to ttfa.org. That’s always the place to submit your story.