I've completed my first full week of teaching. In the hallways, veteran teachers ask me every day how I am feeling, knowing the answer before I have even opened my mouth: I'm exhausted. I am so exhausted.
They smile and nod sympathetically, but almost never try to assure me that it gets better, easier, less tiring. Maybe it doesn't get easier, I worry. Maybe I'll be this tired for the next two years. Maybe the veteran teachers don't tell me that one day I'll be less tired because they're just as tired after their tenth year as I am after my first week.
Maybe it will always be this exhausting because this isn't just the exhaustion that comes from waking up at 5:30 every day and staying at school until 5:30 every night or from being on your feet for 8 straight hours in shoes that just aren't that comfortable or from spending nights and weekends lesson planning. No, this is something more.
This exhaustion is spiritual. It's physical. It's emotional. And, above all, it's real and visceral and consuming. It hits you when you read a student's response to the prompt "Pick an important number in your life and explain" and written in front of you is the sentence "I picked the number 7 because that is the age I was when my mom died" and then you read sentences like that again and again and again. You are engulfed by it when your student writes frankly that his goal for the year is to get in less fights and almost cries when you talk to him about it. This exhaustion blankets you at night as you toss and turn, wondering how you're going to teach so many students with so few resources. It nearly knocks you over when your students look at statistics on the number of Black students suspended versus the number of White students suspended and say "That sounds like us." It eats you alive when you look at your students and realize they need so much more than a geometry teacher can give.
Certainly, this is not the type of exhaustion that goes away with experience. After a few years a teacher may have stacks of lesson plans ready to go and may have figured out what shoes are actually comfortable and may have even adjusted to the 5:30 am wake-up calls, but time and experience does not dull the senses to the suffering of others. The ache in your heart for the things some of your students deal with will never really go away, so what keeps these veteran teachers going after 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, I wonder?
They must be strong, stronger than most. Maybe it's a touch of insanity. Surely veteran teachers must have an unparalleled sense of purpose to keep at this and keep believing that they are making a difference (they are making a difference, any student will say). Mostly it must be love. It must be the swell in your heart when your most difficult student tells you that you're his favorite teacher and the pride in your chest when the girl in you see something click in your student's eyes as you explain adding negative numbers for the fourth time in two minutes. It must be love.
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