I Used to Work with Legends

When I began my high school teaching career, I was thirty years old and had spent four years working as a GTA and adjunct for K-State and Washburn. I knew I loved teaching, but I had no idea what being part of an English department was like. In the fall of 2007, I found out.

The teachers in the LHS English department were exceptional. Smart, funny, conscientious, accountable, and committed to preparing students for what came next. I won’t say all fourteen of us loved each other every day, but I would have put our department up against any other in the state in terms of talent. And some of my very best friends worked there, too.

I have great colleagues now in my current district, but the sense that we are all in it together just isn’t there. We’re a lot of islands strung together in the same sea.

At LHS, we collaborated. We fought. We made up. We revised and wrote new curriculum. We adopted textbooks. We killed off classes that didn’t serve students and introduced new courses that found great success. Some of us had children. Some of us added pets to our lives. Four of us got divorced. Two of us —M and I— married each other.

Outside of the English department, giants walked the other halls. Teachers in Social Studies, Math, and Science inspired me to work harder and think bigger. Elective teachers showed me how to hold high standards while creating great relationships. Support staff kept the whole place going with humor and swearing that can only be described as elegant.

I’ll never work in that kind of golden bubble again. There was something special in that building once upon a time, and we were all aware of and grateful for it. That building and those people made me the teacher I am.

The glory days began to fade as weak administrators started to reach into our classrooms with their inept and incompetent interventions. They undermined, disrespected, and dismissed us, repeatedly telling us we were all replaceable.

They didn’t know what we did. Yes. They could hire another body to stand in our classrooms and deliver our content. But what they couldn’t do, what they would never be able to do, is replace us, because together we were a marvel. Together, we were a force.

And when those administrators are long gone and no one remembers them, it is our names—the names of teachers—that will be spoken with reverence and joy. We knew that then and we know it now.

I used to work with legends, and I miss them every day.