To My Personal Saviors at LHS

I know how appealing it might be to step back and curl up in a ball when the world is fracturing in front of you, when no matter how much you do, you can’t save everything and everyone. But before you call in sick for the next few days or weeks or just hand in your resignation letter now, read this.

Don’t go to school for everyone. They can watch a movie or split up into groups and gossip when they’re supposed to be discussing Thoreau. Don’t go to school to assign papers. Don’t go to school to hand back quizzes or explain all the different French verb tenses. Just don’t.

Go to school for the students who look to you for companionship and guidance. For the loners who’ve already developed a healthy sense of skepticism about the importance of AP tests and need an ally in their fight against the man. Go to school so you can call the guidance counselor on the kid who posts lyrics about suicide as their Facebook status or doesn’t know what to do when the boy they’ve known since elementary school and are in love with is dating someone else. Go to school and eat lunch with the student who doesn’t have a designated spot at a specific table with a select group of friends in the cafeteria. And promise me that you’ll spend all of prom with the people who went solo.

Don’t bother with the parents calling about why their kids got a B instead of an A. Ignore the administration when they tell you that you’re not teaching enough or that you’re teaching too much or that the books you’ve picked aren’t appropriate or that your classes are too free-flowing and need more structure and rubrics. Laugh and move on.

Walk down the beige hallways decorated with pre-approved flyers for people like me. Who need you. Who got through high school because of you. Who may have initially been mad about that whole guidance counselor thing but now in hindsight appreciate it because it meant that you saw them as worth something greater than their GPA before they’d figured that out for themselves.

Does spending a day in sweatpants and eating gummy worms seem like all you can handle right now? Maybe. But suck it up. Put on your finest business attire from H&M or Target, pack up your lunch box, stack up the papers that are spread all over the table, including the one with a coffee stain and a bit of crusted up milk stuck to the corner, and get to class. Because people need you. Remember that. Everything is terrifying right now, but there are a bunch of stressed out, angsty, lost teenagers who go to school and see your classroom as the safest place in the world.

So don’t go to school for every student who expects you to be there because it’s your job. Go to school because for some people, you’re the only reason they’ll make it out of there in one piece.