Right when I am thinking it might be better to step away from all of my abyss-looking and focus more on the positives and what I might like my life to look like, we get the “sell-out,” freewrite prompt. Doesn’t seem there are many positive connotations for me when I consider selling-out, or how I’ve felt sold-out, but there is the way in which I feel good about having sold-out of the 9-5, which in the case of teaching is really more like 6-6, with early morning meetings, after school helping and clubs, grading of ten page essays and lesson planning and prep for the next day of pigheadedness and indifference of the students, some homeless, even two students that year who had witnessed their parents being killed—one homicide and another suicide, and constant monitoring by my damning administrators who never offered kudos or words of encouragement just a non-stop lowering of the limbo bar.
The year I worked as a sixth grade science/social studies teacher at the Title1-A school, thirty students per class, twenty-year old text books and a salary of $38,000, plus incredibly awful health insurance with its impossibly high deductible, believe me when I say, I was doing all I could to buy-in.
The single copy machine meant for all teachers on my wing, was almost always out of ink &/or staples and was shoved into a windowless closet which also functioned as a poor-man’s pantry, filled with junk foods: potatoes with growing eyes, mushy apples, pudding packs, gummy, fruit snacks, Oreo’s and Nutter Butter’s in individual sleeves and a variety of 100% fake juice boxes to pack in weekend backpacks for students to bring home on Friday afternoons.
Intruding upon every inch of open counter-top, stacked floor to ceiling, it was a hot and stuffy room. Behind the closed door, were hall-camera-monitors and the one vintage cell phone teachers were meant to use if they needed to call a student’s parents as we had no phones in our rooms and a faulty intercom system, even though we’d been on lock-down with called in threat, a parent had pulled a gun on another parent in front of the school while dropping off, and my students were prone to fist fights and emotional eruptions, especially the held-back two-feet-taller-than-everyone-else guy whose mother had abandoned him at three.
The federal-poster hanging within the copying-space detailed family sizes and income as based on poverty and I read quite clearly that I, with my newly earned $27,000 fifth year for Masters (all paid for by yours truly), and two kids at home, qualified for the federally-funded, junk-food, backpack-plan. Yes, the realization made me sick and so I didn’t feel terrible the night I was still at school, eight-thirty no breaks, my brown bag snacks long gone, for eating one of those Nutter-Butters.
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