What happens to a teacher when the profession she believed in stops believing in her.
By Kim Lester
Teachers, there is a drive home that a lot of you know.
It is quiet. Not peaceful quiet. The kind of quiet that happens when you have said everything you needed to say in a building where no one heard you and now there is nothing left.
And somewhere on that drive, a question comes.
How did this happen.
Not as something she says out loud. As something that sits in her chest and will not move.
How can I be responsible for everything I do and everything everyone else does at the same time.
Because that is what just happened. A student said things to her that you would not hear in the worst movies. Screamed. Cursed. Went after her weight. Her looks. Said things that would have triggered a report, a meeting, a consequence in any other workplace in this country.
And somehow she is the one who drove home carrying it.
She is the one they told did not listen well enough. Did not build the right relationship. Did not respond correctly to what was being done to her.
The student had no accountability.
The system had no accountability.
And she has all of it.
On that drive home she is not thinking about quitting. She is thinking about something deeper than that. She is thinking about the version of this job she believed in before she knew what it actually was.
Because she had a picture of it.
She grew up watching teachers be the most respected people in the community. Parents trusted them. Not in a polite way. In a real way. The kind of trust where if a teacher said something about a child, everyone believed her. The parents believed her. The leaders believed her. The district believed her. Because they knew she had already done everything in her power to reach that child before she said a word.
There was a partnership. A team. Something that felt like everybody was pointing in the same direction.
She believed in that. She signed up for that.
She signed up for the moment a child understands something for the first time. The look on their face. The aha moment. That moment when learning opens up for somebody who did not know it could. She wanted to be the person who introduced children to the beauty of learning. To exploring. To being creative. To discovering what they were capable of.
She knew teaching would be hard. She never thought it would be this.
She never thought she would spend her days being everything except a teacher. Counselor. Case manager. Social worker. Conflict mediator. Emotional regulator for an entire room of people while her own emotional state goes unacknowledged and unprotected.
She never thought she would be told to build a better relationship with a child who just screamed racial slurs at her.
She never thought that the same system that tells her she is appreciated would stand in front of her with a straight face and make her responsible for what he did.
No one told her that trust had left the profession.
That the partnership she believed in had become something else entirely. Something where the weight goes one direction and one direction only.
Toward her.
Teachers, I want to say something to you that the system is not saying.
What happened to her is not a reflection of her skill.
It is not a reflection of her heart.
It is not evidence that she did not try hard enough, care enough, reach enough.
It is evidence of a system that has stopped protecting the people who show up every single day to do what she signed up to do.
She is not a failure.
She is a teacher in a system that was never redesigned to protect her when things got hard.
And she deserves better than a drive home full of questions nobody helped her answer.
Give yourself the same care you give everyone else.
— Kim 🩷🌿
The After the Bells box was made for the teacher on that drive home. Not to fix what the system broke. To remind her that someone sees her, believes her, and built something just for her.
Join the waitlist and be the first to know when the next box opens.
https://afterthebells.org/pages/waitlist-after-the-bells-official