I left for my mental health. I was worn-out. The relentlessness of teaching in a growingly hostile environment took it out of me. And by hostile environment, I mean mostly "Florida in general", but also "Cobb really specifically in this one way in the summer."
Don't Say Gay, book banning / librarian firing, event cancelling due to accusations of "grooming" and "sexual predators." Indoctrinating children and turning the Gaydar on them.
Equating information with predation, we are accused of encouraging children to "convert" into an LGBTQ lifestyle, or of "talking them into" something.
Confusing teachers treating trans and neuro-divergent students with equality, with us encouraging them to rebel against or defy and undermine their parents is unhelpful at best. Willfully shooting yourself in the foot. When your child feels successful, we ALL benefit and feel successful.
Teachers are, were, and will always be there as your front-line responders to your students. You might have a crappy teacher here and there in your kid's life, but overall we do this job because we genuinely love these kids. We are, anthropologically speaking, all "alloparents" ('other parent' in Greek) of each others children in ways we don't always appreciate. "It takes a village" is not just a saying, it's a reality we should embrace and explore. We teachers are paid nothing. I stopped and looked at what I had spent to make my classes interesting / fun, relevant, tactile, everything, etc, etc. vs what I make, and it was BLEAK. I was always doing too much for too little. The system is going to collapse as the good teachers are just stripped away bit by bit by chronic over-working.
I had stopped taking my meds in August of 2022, and honestly I felt pretty befuddled for most of the year. I had a kind of mental-hiccup, I guess. It was really awful, but the fam and I came through it. I finally came to being more myself in May / June, but by then events were in motion that would push me over the brink.
My personal / teaching items were thrown in the dumpster in what was officially called an 'accident' in July, the week before teacher planning week. It was senseless in dozens of ways - everything that happened before, during, and after defies all explanation. I recovered a good number of my realia and projects, but some things are lost forever. Mentally, I wasn't able to recover from this enough to feel I could "be there" for my new 6th graders at the start of this new year. Not only this, but I felt my complaint was summarily dismissed and closed without having been honestly and openly looked at. I felt let-down that every avenue of redress for this wrong was closed, and nobody was willing to look at 'why?'
This job is too important for someone who has been mentally / emotionally / spiritually battered to be the Gatekeeper to your kid's 6th grade year, ya know? So, I quit. I'm OK now, at FSU as an Academic Advisor.
I'll write more later, but that's it for now. I'm better now, and happy with how things have turned out in the end. I love you all, and if you ever need me, or just want to say 'hi', or send some gods-awful meme, please reach out to me at: joshuaswint@gmail.com