I thought that by making my American Literature syllabus into a zine, I would be saving something. Saving my desire to teach. Saving my subversive stance against traditional education. Saving my students from their mistaken ideas about learning and literature.
(Egads! This last one sounds condescending, doesn’t it? I don’t mean it to be).
If my passion for teaching was flagging, if this might be the last hurrah, then I was gonna go out in my own way, with my own style.
I have always wanted to find a way to make zines more integral to my work. I’m still in that process of discovery for my writing and fiction, but in my work as a teacher, I thought, “What the heck, I’ll do it!”
So I made a zine for my American Lit class. The zine was both syllabus and statement: it was my philosophy as a teacher, distilled into a few pages of amateurish cartooning and clumsy designs. I figured that a zine might intrigue enough students by its format that they would actually read the syllabus. Maybe some of them did.
But making the zine wasn’t enough. By the end of September, the 2021-2022 school year had turned as dismal as the previous one. (This isn’t a Covid thing, by the way. I’ve been in the process of questioning my work as a teacher since about 2018.) The gloom is caused by a lot of things: my ever-lingering feelings of inadequacy as a teacher; my inability to handle the workload of grading papers; my disillusionment with traditional schooling.
(Okay, this last one can be chalked up to Covid… Once we went online in March of 2020, I really started questioning whether the bells and the rigid schedules and the hyper-focus on grades was healthy or good for real education, for real learning. When we suddenly all went home and could spend our time more freely, I began to wonder if the whole “school” thing was just a way to keep kids under control and supervised while parents went to work. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not against parents working or free childcare. But I started to wonder if that’s what society really valued about schools: not the educational aspect but the childcare aspect. Which is fine, I guess, but let’s not church it up.
If we cared about education — real learning — then I feel there is so much more we could be doing to “de-school” our schools and make learning the focus. And then I started reading a lot of anti-Capitalist stuff, and John Holt and Ivan Illich and Teaching as a Subversive Activity, and before I knew it, I was wondering why we kept the traditional model of schooling going at all when it didn’t seem very healthy or fulfilling. Basically, I’ve been in a state of cognitive dissonance for a little over a year, and I don’t know why I thought making a zine syllabus would allay all of these doubts, but I did make one and I did hope for the best. Alas, none of these hopes came to pass.)
So here I am, at end the school year, and the zine syllabus didn’t save me. Nothing I’ve tried has saved me. I’ve tried going “grades-less” (but that’s caused as many problems as it’s tried to address… and surprisingly, students are quite attached to getting grades, at least at the school where I taught). I’ve tried being as subversive as I could, decoupling “schooling” from learning to the best of my ability. But nothing has worked. I mean, it worked for some students, I guess, but the vast majority? No. And it didn’t save teaching for me. It wasn’t the panacea I was hoping for. At about the midpoint of the school year, I thought, “I could go back to a grades-based classroom. I could go back to sticking with the status quo.” But I didn’t want to do any of that. I didn’t want to be part of a system I didn’t belong to anymore.
So that’s why I decided to retire. June 30, 2022 was my last day as a teacher. I feel both insanely afraid and wonderfully free. It’s nice not having to live with the cognitive dissonance anymore, but I won’t lie and say I’m not scared for the future. What if I don’t make enough money as a freelancer? As an indie author? As anything? What if it all goes horribly wrong? For most of my professional life, I’ve been a teacher. Now I’m not.
I can’t say these fears don’t cross my mind everyday. But then I remember the alternative. I remember how miserable I was in the classroom, and how unfair it was to my students to be so miserable. I couldn’t change anything, not really. Not even myself.
I’m glad I made my zine syllabus, though. I’m glad I took the risk to make it and share it with students and parents. I’m proud of the statement it makes, even if that statement hasn’t really come to fruition in my own classroom. But anyway, I’m glad I made it. And I’m proud that I had the courage to move on from teaching into something I’ve dreamed about my entire life. Now all I have to do is keep going.
