This fall began my seventh year teaching and my first year at a new school.

For the first six years of my career, I taught in a large city school with 2,000+ students, half of whom were racial minorities, and over 80% of whom were on free or reduced lunch. In 2015, Harvard University published their findings from a 20-year study on economic mobility and generational poverty. Of the almost 2,500 cities in the study, my city ranked in the bottom ten. Given that we have some of the worst generational poverty in the nation, it is not an overstatement to say that the city’s teachers have one of the most difficult teaching posts in the nation. You can imagine how high the burnout rate is.

I’ll not go into details here about the various factors that made that job nearly impossible, aside from the obvious. That’s a different post for a different time. (A book, really. Probably a darkly humorous memoir, featuring, among others, a sweet anecdote of a time when a boy stormed out of my room and told me, “Fuck you bitch, and your big-ass forehead” all because I’d asked him to please wait a moment before going to get a drink of water. I should note that I was a favored teacher. I should also note that I do indeed have a large forehead.) Suffice to say, it was soul-sucking and gut-wrenching and anxiety-inducing and well, one just didn’t really feel like much of a teacher. I was about four years in when I started to actively pursue leaving, keeping my eyes…