What You Remember When You Remember Your Why

“Remember your why,” she said, and clicked to the next slide.

A collage of photos danced across the screen. Students underneath a rainbow parachute at field day, frozen mid-laughter at the winter carnival, walking together down hallways full of their artwork. Teachers posed with their own children, their husbands and wives, their golden doodles. Candid shots from someone’s birthday party. A baby, face messy with icing, sitting proud in a high chair.

I was in my first year of teaching then, sitting in a folding chair in the school cafeteria for what they called a professional development day. The sun was shining into the room through skylight windows, creating beams of light that captured every particle of dust midair. Someone had arranged little pastries on a table near the door—some stale-looking apple turnovers in a supermarket box. My principal stood at the front of the room and told us, with apparent sincerity, that the cure for what ailed a teacher was located within the teacher. That if we could just remember why we came here, we could weather anything the job asked of us.

I remember tearing up, tears trickling down my cheeks as I studied the small faces of the children I was about to meet in a few days. I remember the sunlight warming the back of my neck at just the right moment. I felt like everything was serendipitous. I was not embarrassed about it. I was twenty-three and new and I believed that caring enough was the same as having enough.

Here is what I had not yet learned: that slide was not inspiration. It was a mechanism. It was a way of converting our love for our students into leverage against our own needs. It said: your students deserve to have you at your best, even without the necessary resources. It said: if you’re struggling, the struggle is yours to solve, even without the necessary support. It said: remember why you came, which meant, keep coming, regardless of what it cost you.

Three years later, she was still my principal. Three years later, I clenched my jaw when we got to that slide.

* * *

My contracted hours began at 8:30, just a few minutes before the bell rang and my students arrived. Occasionally, meetings were called at 8:00 or 8:15, before I was paid to be there. I attended those too, because I had been told attendance was not optional. I gave those minutes like I gave everything: without being asked twice, without anyone noticing they were mine to give. At the end of the week, when I confirmed my hours, I was not given an option to note that I had been called to work 30 minutes before I began getting paid. Those 30 minutes were added to the abyss of unpaid time disguised as “part of the job.”

But the bigger problem was what happened after the first bell. On Wednesdays and Fridays, during the school day, I was required to leave my students to attend midday Professional Learning Community (PLC) meetings. Every grade level has these meetings during their designated planning time. Unfortunately, meeting attendance mandates didn’t consider that special education teachers (like myself) often work with multiple grade levels. My planning period did not align with any one grade level. I was required to attend these meetings regardless. My fourth graders were in my classroom, waiting for their literacy instruction. I was in the room next door, sitting through a PLC meeting that interfered with my ability to teach. 

My students were eight, nine, and ten years old. They had differing disabilities, resulting in each of them having Individualized Education Plans—IEPs, legally binding documents specifying what services they were entitled to receive, from whom, and for how many minutes per week. Federal law. Not a guideline. Not a suggestion. The word mandated in IEP-mandated services did not mean encouraged. It did not mean when convenient. It meant required by law.

When I left for PLC meetings, my aides were supposed to cover my class, but they had been given old student Chromebooks at the beginning of the school year. These Chromebooks did not have USB ports, so they could not connect to the Promethean smart board. They also could not print worksheets from school printers. So when I left, my aides stood in front of a board they could not operate, and my students sat waiting for instruction that wasn’t coming.

In September, during the first week of required PLC meetings, I raised my hand. “My students are not receiving instruction during these meetings because I am required to be here. My aides do not have what they need to cover.”

My principal winced and offered to speak with me after the meeting, since this was inapplicable to everyone else. After the meeting, I was told to ask the literacy department for more textbooks so the smart board wouldn’t be needed. I was told to print the Powerpoints and make them into packets for my students and aids to use instead. I was told that my white board would suffice for the 45 minutes I’d be out of the room. I was told my attendance at the meetings was nonnegotiable.

Then, in December, the school launched a building-wide reading intervention to address the 40% passing rate on the Reading Standards Of Learning Statewide Assessment. Groups were created for instruction. Schedules were written. Teachers were assigned to groups. Nobody consulted IEPs. Nobody asked which students were on whose caseload. 

The result was that I was given a group of students, several of whom did not even have IEPs, and none of whom were on my caseload. The students on my actual caseload were distributed across other groups, taught by other teachers, during the time I was supposed to be providing them the specialized instruction mandated by their IEPs.

My students all read below the 10th percentile for their grade level. All of them had IEP goals related to decoding and phonological awareness deficits. To address these goals, I had been trained in an intensive decoding literacy intervention program. I was supposed to be utilizing this training, this specific program, to help my students learn how to read. Yet, my students were scattered amongst other teachers, getting whatever form of literacy intervention they could, and I was giving remediation to a group of students who had never been identified as needing special education services. 

The schedule change to accommodate the building-wide reading intervention was announced during the first PLC meeting of December. I raised my hand again. “This prevents me from delivering IEP-mandated intervention to the students I am legally responsible for.”

I was told the schedule was the schedule.

Then, at the end of another PLC meeting in February, after many snow days resulted in many missed instructional days, my principal mentioned that the building-wide intervention time would expand. It would now include math and science remediation, focusing on one subject per week. She said this was to address the loss of instructional time, so our students would be ready to take all of their Standards of Learning assessments in May. She said it the way you say something you are not interested in discussing, when the meeting was already over, bags were packed, and people were already standing. I started to cry. I could not help it. It was too much. She left the room.

* * *

At the beginning of March came the field trip.

For months, I had approval to go to Jamestown with the fourth-grade class. My students were going. I knew these kids, specifically: which one needed me sitting nearby during an unstructured morning, which one shut down without a familiar face when the day got hard, which one would have a great time and not need me at all but deserved to see me there anyway. I had arranged to be there. It was settled, the way things were settled when the people who were supposed to confirm them had confirmed them.

At 3:10 p.m. the day before the trip, I was told I was not allowed to attend. Funding, they said. No space on the bus.

Other support staff, such as ESL teachers and other special education teachers, attended without issue.

The day before, my principal had called my classroom about my PLC attendance. The conversation was not gentle. I had missed several meetings because I had students who needed to be tested and aides who could not cover and a schedule that made compliance with every requirement simultaneously impossible. The message I received was clear: the meetings came first.

I want to be precise because precision matters when you are describing retaliation: she reminded me of my absences on Wednesday, and on Thursday I was removed from the field trip. 

My coworkers encouraged me to speak with my principal about my schedule. Maybe she didn’t understand the reality of my schedule conflicts, they offered. I printed out my schedule. I brought it to my principal and sat in her office showing her that the required attendance at PLC meetings directly interfered with my ability to provide my 4th graders with their scheduled literacy instruction. When I asked, “What do I prioritize—meetings or instruction?” she pursed her lips. My principal did not have answers. Just the ability to remove me from a field trip the day before it happened.

I called HR. I explained what happened. I explained the sequence of events. I told them I believed I had been retaliated against. They told me to meet with my principal and tell her my concerns. I already had.

* * *

Once a year, I am given an opportunity to share my concerns in the School Climate Survey. The survey is a series of statements, and for each one I am asked to select: 

Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree.

You feel supported at school.
You feel prepared to conduct lessons.
You feel your concerns are heard.

At the end, there is a small box with the heading: Questions or Comments.

That is all. There is no form to evaluate my principal’s performance. There is no process by which I could put on record, formally, the ways that building has failed my students and me. There is no signature line where someone has to confirm they have received my concerns, which is not the same as agreeing with them. There is just a box. 

I always fill it in. Nobody ever follows up.

This is my review. 

* * *

To my principal, 

You claimed to serve all students. You did not serve my students. You built a program without checking whether it conflicted with their legal rights, and when I told you it did, you told me “the schedule was the schedule.” You gave my aides equipment that did not function as needed and called it classroom coverage. You did not send me the intervention data I was legally required to have in order to monitor my students’ progress. I asked for it. It did not arrive.

You also assigned me professional development homework to complete on my own time to make up for a meeting that was cancelled, time that would not have been unpaid had the meeting happened. I understand this was small, but small things accumulate. Every small thing declared “part of the job” was another confirmation that my time did not count.

You retaliated against me by pulling me from a field trip. It was dressed up in logistics, but it was not logistics and I believe you knew that.

When I raised concerns about meetings conflicting with my instructional time, you told me the schedule was already in place. When I missed meetings due to my conflicting schedule, you retaliated against me. When I went to HR, they sent me back to you. Nobody had answers, I was told. What nobody had was interest in finding them.

You told me to remember my why while taking apart, one piece at a time, the conditions under which my why could exist.

You were not doing your job.

* * *

And yet.

Here is the part I could not write down:

I love this work.

Not the data entry. Not the compliance theater of progress monitoring forms that existed to satisfy auditors who would never set foot in my classroom. Not the PLC meetings.

I love the parts that catch me off guard. The parts that remind me I am not just managing a caseload, but actually living alongside people.

A student who barely speaks to their peers always, religiously, greets me with “Good Morning, Ms. Walton.” Another has found wonder in my hair texture, so normal to me, so boring, so straight, yet so different from her own. She has taught herself to braid, twisting and turning strands of my red hair between her tiny fingers until she figures it out. A kid who fights his own body to stay seated during a lesson goes entirely still when a classmate is having a hard day. I watch him as he leans over and hugs calm into his friend. I watch this and think: he has been patient his whole life. I am still learning to be.

One student came to me in September unable to read. Not behind grade level. Not catching up. Unable. We worked on it the way you work on something that matters, carefully and with repetition, in whatever minutes the schedule left us. One afternoon in February he looked up from a page and something had shifted in his face. Not pride exactly—more like recognition. Like he had just met a version of himself he did not know existed.

I think about that face on the hard days. It gets me back to the work.

I did not know a job could impact me like this. I did not know I would become someone whose mood could be changed by a ten-year-old’s handwriting improvement, whose Tuesday could be saved by a kid who remembered to ask about my weekend. I did not know that my name would be sung by dozens of little voices, every single day, many of whom I have never taught. I did not know that being cared for by children, receiving their specific and unguarded attention, would feel like something I needed as much as they needed anything from me.

The work is saving me. The work is also taking something from me I am not sure I can get back. I have made peace with the fact that both of these will always be true.

* * *

For three years, the institution’s version of me has been a problem to manage. A teacher who misses meetings. An overdue data sheet. A concern sent back down the chain. A circle bubbled in on a climate survey, somewhere between Neutral and Disagree, that nobody ever follows up on.

That is not who I am in that building.

I am the person those kids look for when they get off the bus. I am the one who knows which one needs five minutes of quiet before the day begins and which one needs to tell me something immediately, before anything else can happen. I know which one sat next to a classmate who could not read independently the month before and read them their entire library book, without being asked, without making it into anything. I know that letting my students eat lunch in my classroom is the best part of their day, so I say yes almost every time they ask, even if that means I don’t get a ‘break’. 

I have been failed by the people whose job it was to support me. The schedule, the Chromebooks, the field trip, the meeting with HR. The planning meeting that ended with my principal walking out of the room as I began to cry.

I know what it looks like when an institution decides you are not worth the trouble of a real answer. I have watched it happen to my students. It looks like this.

I am not leaving yet. I have tried to want to leave and I cannot get there, because my students are on the other side of that door and I have not found a way to make that not matter.

Next fall, my principal will stand at the front of the cafeteria again. There will be pastries near the door. She’ll click to a slide full of children’s faces, our students’ faces, and she’ll say: remember your why.

And if I am there, picking at a stale apple turnover wrapped in a school paper towel,watching the dust particles dancing in the sunlight, I will remember. 

I will remember exactly.