Though the first year was another humbling experience, overall, I deemed it a success simply because I made it through. Though I still didn’t have the training I needed to deal with many of the deeper issues I mentioned in my previous post, I felt more supported by the staff at Jesuit. For what it’s worth, the school had a much better support system than my position at Grace King. I had a mentor teacher, a Disciplinarian, and other English teachers that I could call for help. However, they were all swamped, as was I, so things often slipped through the cracks.

I was also confident I could approach my 9th-grade class with more bite and that most of them would be more mature by the time they were going back to school. The next three years were a blur, and though I had my fair share of disciplinary problems, I can’t remember a distinct moment like the “lewd gestures” situation from my first year.

The COVID-19 Pandemic

Perhaps it was a sign that this wasn’t the lifestyle for me when my coworker and I celebrated the school shutdown in March 2020 due to COVID-19. The transition from school to fully at-home learning was terrible for everyone. My principal’s written expectations were quite high; students should expect to be in digital classrooms for the entire class each day, but the teacher was also expected to record videos of the lesson and post them online.

After a week of only a handful of students, and then fewer, showing up to the classes, I decided to switch things up. I’d post my own videos three times a week and have students complete work based on the videos. The other two days were for other activities: recorded discussions between classmates, YouTube videos & responses, or reading time. I had “office hours” daily where students could join a Zoom channel if they needed to discuss anything or had any questions. No one ever joined.

COVID-19 changed the game for a lot of parents. Perhaps they realized how bratty their kids could be because I was suddenly getting sympathetic emails asking what they could do to get their kids to do the work I assigned.

The next year, the school went into hybrid mode. We started with a rotating schedule, with students with last names from A to L physically in school one day, then “at home learning” the next, when M to Z would go to class. I put “at-home learning” in class because students would treat those days as “days off” instead of working from home.

These were the days when the hypocrisy of teachers made my job even harder. Many of my coworkers and I would stress the importance of wearing masks properly and taking the correct stairs (we have “up” and “down” staircases to relieve congestion), and some would even write PHs for multiple offenses. Meanwhile, our new Disciplinarian (Top had since retired) and even the president of the school would wander the halls with his mask worn as a chin strap.

Everything was a struggle, from getting students to do the assigned work, sanitizing the desks after each class, and figuring out the lunch schedule based on what floor your classroom was on. This was in addition to an already insanely busy schedule.

Fighting for Books: The Book Banning Epidemic

If the struggles of the pandemic weren’t enough, the first book I assigned to Freshmen in the fall semester of 2021, a Young Adult novel called “Darius the Great is Not Okay” rubbed some “concerned” parents the wrong way. She sent an elaborate email to me, with the department head, the principal, and the president of the school CC’d.

This parent had visited Goodreads, a website that can be best described as the “Yelp” of books, and saw the book was tagged “LGBT” and “Queer.” She didn’t need any other context to immediately tell me and all of my bosses how not okay she was with this book.

The president of Jesuit, a good old boy Louisianan whom my coworker would call “mask-down Towns,” received the email quite negatively. When my coworker was filling me in on the conversations he overheard between the president and the principal, he prefaced our conversation with, “Father Towns is… more homophobic than I realized.”

“I want this book removed, and all the students who bought it refunded their money,” he apparently told our principal. Luckily, the principal had the good sense to talk Fr. Towns down. He framed it very democratically: “If we do this,” he explained, “we give parents the power to get rid of any book they want.” Towns’s homophobic reaction, the real elephant in the room, went conspicuously unaddressed.

Keep in mind that neither the mother, the president, nor the principal had actually read this novel.

Every new book introduced to the English curriculum at Jesuit underwent an extensive approval process designed to combat this exact situation. With book bans happening around the country and parents already making a fuss about some of the established classic literature, the English department tried to get ahead of the curve to prove how each new book we taught aligned with the “mission statements” of Jesuit High School.

I introduced Darius the Great is Not Okay to the 9th-grade curriculum. The book is a beautiful story of an awkward Iranian/German kid who makes his first friend. I answered how the book fit with Jesuit High School New Orleans’ mission, and a couple of teachers on the board read the book and my proposal, and they approved the novel, saying they enjoyed the read.

Not that it matters, but this book only had the slightest hint that the main character, Darius, was gay. If you’re a strong reader (which, sadly, most of my students weren’t), you’d only pick up that Darius was gay through subtext and context. The novel was a coming-of-age story of an awkward kid who made a friend and connected with his father.

Each year, it seemed there was more and more of this type of nonsense to deal with. The previous year, I had a mother complain about the novel Landscape with Invisible Hand because the main character, a ninth-grader in the book, mused about “what was under” his girlfriend’s shirt. For her, this type of “sexually explicit content” was inappropriate for her son. Meanwhile, I overheard one of the raunchiest, most disgusting conversations I’ve ever heard between said son and his friends in the lunchroom.

Book censorship was an ongoing battle I really didn’t have the energy for. Why do we have such an elaborate process for approving novels only to have the rug pulled from under us? Do we really want to have a person who had such a revolting response to a book that was simply tagged LGBT on a review website as a role model for our students and, worse than that, the leader of the entire school?

When one of our classes finished the novel, a students came up to me after class when all the others had left. “Is Darius gay?” he asked.

“What makes you say that?” I asked coyly.

“The undertones here,” he read out a few lines from the novel.

“Wow,” I responded. “Not many people would’ve noticed that. I think the author is heavily implying the character is gay, but Darius is still trying to process it, I think.”

The student thanked me, smiled, and left. It was a proud moment as an English teacher. That a student at that age could not only read between the lines and figure out something implied by the author was so impressive.

But most of all, I was impressed with just how far the generation of students has come since I went to Jesuit in the early 2000s. At that time, everything that was uncool or stupid was labeled “gay.” Students who were deemed to be “gay” were ostracized by most. However, coming back to Jesuit as a teacher less than 20 years later, some students were openly gay, roaming the halls and friends with everyone and anyone. It’s so incredible how quickly society can change and become more accepting.

The Biggest Problem of All: Burnout

In Steven King’s memoir On Writing, he summarized his brief time as a teacher like this: “Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your brain, draining all the juice out.” My girlfriend and I would spend so many of our Friday evenings having our good friends over, ordering in, watching music videos on YouTube, and me passing out at around 8:30 PM. I’d have so little energy to do chores around the house or run errands.

If I wasn’t spending the weekend catching up on grading, I’d be thinking about all the grading I was getting behind on. On the one hand, I wanted to assess students on a critical-thinking level rather than simply memorization. That meant I needed to craft tests and quizzes with more short-answer style questions or come up with multiple-choice questions that weren’t based on memory. This would take an insane amount of time.

The curriculum also required me to assign two essays for English III and three paragraphs for English I quarterly. On top of this, there were weekly vocabulary quizzes, bi-weekly novel quizzes (or more – up to the teacher), a minimum of two tests, and a quarterly exam, which included an in-class essay and an ungodly amount of grading.

A year or two into my service industry days, I applied for an English teaching position at Jesuit. My resume of “experience” at the time barely fit a full page. The principal then met up with me and gave me words of encouragement, but he said, “The English Department has the least turnover at the school. Teachers have been here for years and show no signs of leaving soon.”

But when I started teaching there seven years after my first application, the school had a huge turnover rate, especially in the English department. The ones who stayed had unwavering dedication to the school, were single, or would simply give flat grades for essays based on their “gut feeling.”

Perhaps it was the overwhelming expectations the department was placing on the shoulders of the English teachers. Instead of reducing the load on both students and teachers, the department consistently added more and more work. It just didn’t make sense.

Making the Buzzword Real: Student Growth

When looking back to my relationship with schooling in my teenage years, I only partially connected with all the literature we studied, especially some of the older content. Classes went something like this: you’re assigned some material to read, the teacher talks about the material the next day and asks close-ended questions about the reading, and if no one had the answer, they’d give us the answer, we’d take notes, and later would take a quiz or test on the things covered in class.

As a teacher, getting students to connect with the content we read would take a bit more effort. Sure, not everyone would love every piece, but I at least wanted them to have some context of why the stuff we read was important. I also wanted the class to be more proactive and student-centered.

In my fourth year at Jesuit, I got some of my 06 students from three years ago in my English III class. We were reading J. Alfred Prufrock, a particularly dense and odd poem. The poem was a fragmented depiction of Prufrock’s, the main character, neurotic social tendencies. He stood on the steps outside of a house party, speaking to his potential, nonexistent lover. I studied the poem several times in college and was never particularly impressed by the writing, though I probably didn’t understand it fully then.

To make it more engaging, we listened to T. S. Eliot’s reading of the poem while following Julian Peters’s comic book adaptation of the piece. Eliot’s droning, monotonous voice compliments the creepy illustrations Peters created.

One of my students came up to me after we finished the poem and asked me, “Did Eliot have autism?” I could tell he was serious about this question. “I only ask because I recently found out I’m on the spectrum, and I’ve experienced something exactly like Prufrock has. The overwhelming weight of simply opening a door to join a party.”

Seeing just one student connect with a poem that even I, as their teacher, thought was a bit boring (but important!) was one of the most satisfying moments of my career. That final year, I gave all of my students much more freedom to explore literature. My classroom was much more project and discussion-oriented, giving students class time to read, research, and teach the content we were covering. I sat back and gave them assessments based on student-generated questions and content.

I had a unique perspective on seeing the growth of this particular group of students, many of whom I taught for three out of five years of their Jesuit careers. I witnessed their maturity grow incredibly, from kids who barely knew the difference between nouns and verbs to students who could run the classroom independently, given minimal direction, and make deep, personal connections to the densest poetry.

My “Cannonball Moment”?

In my four years as a teacher at Jesuit High School, I heard St. Ignatius of Loyola’s cannonball story dozens of times. Every sermon, retreat, or professional development somehow included this anecdote. It goes something like this:

Ignatius, not sure what he wanted to do with his life, dedicated himself to the army. In the Battle of Pamplona, a cannonball struck Ignatius’s leg, which left him bedridden for several months. During this time, he contemplated his life up to that moment and decided to become closer to God. Because he couldn’t leave his bed, he had time to truly contemplate his life. This was the first step (or not) Ignatius took to start the Jesuits.
This story would always end the same. “What is your cannonball moment,” the presenter would ask.

I didn’t realize how much I needed to reflect on my time as a teacher to see the incredible good the profession offers. Writing these posts has made me realize my mistakes, reflect on how much the students matured, and see my own growth. It was a reflection I needed to truly appreciate the experience I had there, but I also got to digest many of the things I should’ve seen as unacceptable at the time.

With that in mind, am I tempted to go back into teaching?

Hell no.

Well… maybe…

Nah, definitely not.

I’d hear this really often: “You’re just not at the right school.” However, Jesuit was the “best” school in New Orleans by many measures. Does this “right school” actually exist?

My girlfriend’s dream job at the World Food Programme, headquartered in Rome, was becoming a reality. When she first applied and had interviews at the beginning of the 2021 school year, I was reluctant about leaving my hometown, friends, and secure job behind. However, the events of my last year as a teacher solidified in me that it was time to move on.

In October of 2021, we held a small ceremony, marrying in front of a handful of friends and family. She headed off to Rome in January as I finished up the school year.

And so the cycle continues. Years in an industry, learning the ropes and searching for respect, happiness, and purpose: my own cannonball moment. Never quite finding any of it, but coming close. All I knew was the cycle of getting behind on grading, keeping up with lesson plans, and falling asleep at 8pm on a Friday night wasn’t the lifestyle I wanted to lead.