I didn't mean to overstep. I didn't mean to say it like that. I didn't mean to say so much. I didn't mean to get into it. I never mean to.
Look: I already know I'm too much; I sit with it constantly. My brain is chaos, is constant, is violence and glitter. I say far less than what runs through me because you're right, we were all right, today: language is insufficient; language shapes it, and cheapens it, and destroys the core of it, and I know the vocabulary only exists in metaphor. What I feel opens up chasms inside me and I would never, fucking ever, change that: not for you, not for anyone. I am violently proud of it. It's not wrong. The question, here, whether I should apologize for not being able to tone it down.
The thing is, though, I don't want to and I don't need to. An apology would just start the conversation I actually want to have: explain to me, please, what the fuck is going on. Why I can't find my footing, why the reverberations keep shaking me off, why I can't seem to trust my senses. I am confounded, which is oh so fine, let me just flash a smile, tilt my chin up in interest, or it would be fine if it didn't matter so much that I fucking understand.
This keeps happening. I keep staring. I don't know how to stop. Those chasms that open up inside me don't go away: I am granite ravines and open wounds. It's days like these I wish we could see inside each other because how else do I explain it to you ----- "it is all. it is nothing." is not a koan to me.
But I flash a smile. Tilt up my chin. Say too much nothing. And leave feeling like I have to apologize.
So: I didn't mean to, honest. I'm sorry if I overstepped, if I let something slip, if I made it too obvious. Even when I was silent, I'm sorry if I spoke too fucking loud.
Back at 18, when I was trying to figure out my shit, I told him I think I want to teach high school English and his face crunched up. “You’re going to have trouble,” he said, “and I don’t know what you’re going to get out of it.” I’d been talking about business law and Toronto lofts, psychiatry and academia. I think he was worried it wouldn’t be “enough” for me. He’d taught high school English for a decade, so maybe I should have listened.
I didn’t.
Instead, I forged ahead -- through English Lit then Education, through panic attacks and starry-eyed idealism, into a small independent school in Montreal. The job kinda fell into my lap -- I still, seven years later, haven’t actually said yes. I had a ten-minute meeting where I talked mainly about, like, some random backstage class I took in my B.A., and the then-principal said, “Great, we’ll see you Monday” -- and I awkwardly shrugged and left.
Yeah. Not your typical teacher interview, but, in retrospect ---- how totally symbolic of my time at this place: chaotic, uncertain, incredible, and absolutely fated.
Fated. Yes, that: the pull towards this little school in NDG can’t be called much else. I have met some of the most important people in my life here -- colleagues who became wonderful friends, students who changed me profoundly. This school is a fate-suck -- it pulls some of the best souls in the universe into close (sometimes-airless) quarters. If you survive the crazy, you come out diamond. The moments I’ve had in that goddamn building have made me ecstatic and wretched, but there wasn’t a single fucking second I questioned where I was meant to be.
Until last year.
Personally and professionally, things started shifting. Not because it wasn’t “enough” -- teaching has always been so much more than you can imagine, in every sense -- but because that ol’ fate-suck was pushing me out. There’s else out there, everything was screaming, there’s somewhere new to be. And I didn’t want to listen; I had so much going for me; I was happy, wasn’t I, most days? It took a real slap in the face to realize a leap out was, increasingly, necessary.
So in the fall, I start a full-time MA in Literature. This is, basically, where everyone always expected me to end up. I’m 31. Most of my friends are in established careers; almost no one is going back to school at this age -- much less ‘useless’ school. God, if everything works out -- it’ll be so easy to look back at the past seven years as a waste of time, won’t it? Jill, why did you bother spending all that time teaching high school? What did you get out of it?!
Ah. What did I get out of it, huh.
Buckle in, now, because I loved it. I loved it. And I hated it. And I felt. And I worked furiously, and I danced in my classroom with the SmartBoard speakers, and I stared silently at the wall for hours after the school emptied. I taught Leonard Cohen and Alan Moore and Lewis Carroll and Billy Shakes. I forced the Tea Party and David Bowie down ear canals and made my students do music assignments whenever possible. I experimented with some weird shit (existentialist show & tell! address vignettes! interior songalogues!) and finally figured out how to teach literary essay introductions. I questioned everything I did, and I laughed so loud that people could hear it down the hall. For seven years, I gave myself to that school.
And I learned. A lot.
I learned that a thick skin is necessary, but so is a big, messy, open heart.
You build walls out of necessity, when asshole students roll their eyes at the lessons you’ve spent careful hours planning. You learn that surface bullshit, negative or positive, is irrelevant -- a kid blithely saying “this is stupid,” if you know why you’re doing it, doesn’t hurt so much; “you’re my favourite teacher,” when you know they’re just saying it, doesn’t help. What they say, in passing, doesn’t affect you the way it does first-year teachers (fresh meat!) once you’ve got that armour in place.
But, oh but: I’ve seen what happens when my students let their guard down. I have felt conversations take place differently; watched normally quiet people exclaim, bright-eyed; heard balls-out honesty. These are delicate flames that can be easily blown out ---- unless the person asking the questions opens up, big & intense, in return. So I make my bad jokes and gesture wildly and get too excited when someone says interesting because I can’t help it ----- I am all-in, every goddamn day. And yes, some people will laugh; the thick skin helps, when that happens.
But that messy open heart helps a lot more. And if you need me to offer a shoulder, or a shitty that’s what she said pun, or a space to blaze ---- I will be there, every time.
And anyway, you learn most from the shit that hurts hardest.
From students laughing, sleeping, or ignoring me as I shared what I thought mattered most; lessons and classes that flopped, catastrophically. From colleagues and friends moving on or away. From other teachers being cooler or more popular or ‘better’; discovering my limits as an educator (and oh there are many). From an intense couple years of depression; from crying in my car, fixing my makeup, and walking in to teach first period. From being told I wasn’t the right fit, that I didn’t quite match the box they wanted.
But come on -- I can’t contort myself that way. I suspect that’s what my dad really wanted to tell me, back at 18 -- much as they might pretend to, Derbys don’t fit in boxes. They are constantly pressing to get out, fierce and passionate -- and passion hurts. This, I have brought to all my classes: be passionate. Rage. You will be questioned, you will get frustrated; there, you’ll learn. “Complacency,” I always say when I teach Animal Farm, “is Ms. Derby’s least favourite word.” But you don’t get to bust out of it without breaking a few damn bones.
So speak up and out, but don’t ever cut someone off.
I used to derive a lot of that passion from anger. I'd be up in arms because I disagreed or there was an injustice or just fuck you no! This does not translate to a high school classroom. Consider teenagers, in all their extremes: they do not respond well to yelling. They just yell back --- and yeah, fair enough. So I had to start thinking about what I was trying to accomplish with my interactions. At work, it was usually trying to, y'know, educate -- meaning I wanted people to truly understand a topic or process. It’s real easy for me to talk; if I've created a lesson on it, I probably give many fucks about it.
But it’s not about me, when I’m teaching. At all. It’s about who I’m talking to, and what they’re getting out of our encounter. So these days, in and out of the classroom, I try as hard as I can (and I’m still working on it) to shut up. More often than not, what people need is someone to listen, genuinely -- not just wait for their turn. Particularly, my fellow passion-sluts, when we’re just talking to hear ourselves speak. You aren’t proving a point; you don’t seem smart or cool; to what end?
Now of course ---- to what end, right. If that end is standing up for someone or something you believe in, well -- you best believe you’ll still see me angry. Often, in staff meetings -- because often, I am fighting for my students or my colleagues. Cause like, hippie BS and all, it’s true: people matter more than ideas -- that, I’ve learned, too.
Becauselove manifests everywhere, even when you don’t want it to.
Ahhh that “favourites” thing teachers are always asked about. Look: to deny that students are individual human beings is a total disservice to them, and no one likes everyone they meet, so sure -- there’ve been individuals in my classes who have resonated more strongly with me than others. But it was never really about "favourites," because if you were in my class, I goddamn fucking loved you. Whether I wanted to or not: if you walked through that door into my room, you were loved. Every second you were my student. Deeply and without question. Point finale. Whether you were making my life so hard I cried when I got home, or meeting me for lunch dates and working your ass off -- all I wanted was the absolute best for you. It seethed in me.
From that, my most important personal discovery: love matters more than anything, anything else. And what I felt for my classes and my students -- somewhere along the way -- started translating to my personal life.
It can be the hardest possible thing to choose love over anger or fear (and all the self-interest that comes with 'em). I am still learning. But the more I do it, the more I openly and genuinely love in my interactions and choices, the easier it gets. To what end do we dislike and hate each other? To what end do we feel the need to come out on top? You may have answers. Mine haven't held up. I love deeper, more resolutely, and intensely than I ever have. I am more than I ever was. This is thanks to the worst and the best of my students -- all of whom I loved. Without question. Regardless.
Of course, with love comes letting go, right, and what happens one year will differ dramatically, unforeseeably, the next.
Some classes (groups or periods) are magic. This magic is unlikely, unpredictable, and only rarely lasts past a year. I’m lucky to have had a few truly magic classes -- classes that were a goddamn gift to teach. They were full of passionate, or brilliant, or hilarious, or generally wonderful people -- often all of the above -- and they probably know who they were. But the hardest part of a magic class is knowing you could get the exact same group the next year, and it will be something completely else.
So when you find it, let that magic rage, because it won’t last.
But then, neither will the fog --
-- and none of it negates what came before.
So, sometimes you have to step forward blind and hope for the best.
I love anticipation. My favourite moments are those of transition -- like when I've finished planning a fucking stellar lesson and don't have to actually teach it until the next day. Then, while the kids are doing their requisite silent reading, I...try to figure out any possible way to postpone the lesson and teach it next week omg let's just not let's just not.
As a lit-bitch, with fictional paths winding multiple directions, possibility is everything to me; when things are realized, they lose the arcs and winding paths they could have taken. It seems like I’m cheated, somehow, when a choice is made -- but life doesn’t work like literature. Anyone can exist contently in limbo -- but there’s no true joy when you know you’re not at your best. And oh yes -- you could fail, spectacularly. I had no idea how these lessons would go; I have no idea how this MA is going to go.
But once upon a time, the night before I was bringing a play called Third Person into my grade 11 class -- I panicked. I deeply believed in this play and the people producing it, and I knew I hadn’t quite yet clicked with this class, and the possibility of it all was paralyzing. That class -- last period on October 24th, 2013 -- symbolized what mattered to me in art and what mattered to me in education smashing together. How it went would define the next four years. I was terrified. I wanted to cancel.
But I didn’t.
It went flawlessly, better than I could have expected, for everyone involved, changed the class dynamic and spun it into one of the most rewarding experiences of my career (life!),
and every time I am afraid to make a decision, I think of that day.
Because while it is terrifying to fall, staying still cannot possibly bring bliss like that.
And I have to risk falling, because I am still learning.
My desk is always full of books and toys (it starts with one, man, and then that's all you get from the kids). I don't plan things out too far in advance (the school I've worked at has also taught me flexibility, c o u g h). I’m late for my own classes and I derail my own lessons when someone says something cool. I lack a system.
I have colleagues who are truly excellent high school teachers -- and while we are all very different people, the thing they have that I unequivocally lack is organization. I am, cheerfully, a chaos bomb -- and the best high school teachers are not chaotic. Or maybe best isn't the right word -- most suited, let's say. The people most suited to the environment of precollegiate education are organized, scheduled, and regimented. None of those adjectives describe me.
But that's okay, because all of this is a fucking process. Listen, the second you start thinking you know everything, you are a useless teacher (and human being). You remember ----- there is nothing worse than someone who says ask me anything, I will have the answer. Pretentious assholery aside, they're delusional. They are lying. Google that shit or reflect on what you could do better or go to cognitive behavioural therapy, but do not dare think you got it all right. We have no answers, at the front of the class or otherwise -- or at least, none that are uniformly, universally true. We have the answers we know at a given moment in time. And we are never done learning.
I’ll probably never effectively organize incoming assignments -- but I’m going to work my ass off trying. I don’t want to settle. I don’t want to rest on my laurels or make excuses. I pick my battles, but rest assured: inside, I am always battling something. I am always trying to be better.
Thus: the next step.
Hopeful, and chaotic, and passionate, much as my teaching has been -- much as I am, because there has never been much difference between Ms. Derby and Jill.
So there it is -- seven things I’ve learned over the past seven years of teaching. Green, fresh-meat Jill, walking down to her interview from Cafe 92 seven years ago, had literally no idea what was coming.
My father -- who passed away when I was 19, and from whom I learned perhaps the most -- was right: it wasn’t easy. I can’t ask him if he thinks it was enough --- but hey -- nothing ever is: we strive for better, for more. But let me tell you -- every minute of my time here has been beyond worth it, and I am stomach-knottingly grateful for each one.
To anyone who played a role in it, in or outside the building -- I can’t express what it’s meant. Thank you for listening, strategizing, having my back; for inspiring & challenging me; for keeping me sane and accepting my voice -- loud and intense as it’s been. And those of you who are at the core of my heart: you know who you are, and y’ain’t going anywhere.
It has been a privilege and a disaster and I have loved all of it more than I thought humanly possible.
