Reasons to Quit Academia

I just got my teaching evaluations back from my last semester of school. Well, hot damn. They were the worst yet. Statistically, I was still above average and given an overall "well done" but the supplemental comments were biting and immature. I'm ready to throw in the hat and take up a secretarial job, one where I can blend into the background and be required of no more creativity than to find different ways to say, "How may I transfer your call?"

Sure, maybe the last semester before graduating is supposed to be tough. Along with teaching two classes of sophomore composition, I was in the middle of revising the final drafts of my thesis and meeting for various defenses (that seemed to only get held between my two classes, requiring me to run across campus). I can blame this on my classes being held in dorm rooms, one room being completely unusable one morning because the door lock had run out of batteries. So we sat in a dim, dingy commons room next to a broken full screen television, underneath movie posters of the most intellectually challenging showcase (Star Trek: Nemesis, Never Been Kissed, Zoolander, Cheaper By the Dozen, I Know What You Did Last Summer). I could blame this on the lack of working dry erase markers, the complete lack of any kind of technology and of broken technology with missing parts I don't realize don't work until after I've wheeled big screen televisions and three foot high speakers across campus to the dorms in a wheelbarrow provided by the media warehouse. I could blame this on one classroom's replacement of erasers with large dirty white rags and a white erase board that actually pressed into the wall as I wrote on it, requiring me to place my other hand on the board to steady my writing area.

But I was optimistic. I knew I wouldn't score as high this semester because my mind really was focused on graduating and filling out all the red tape. But perhaps, after all, I am still too young to be teaching, too immature and too close to the students put in my classes. Yes, it IS difficult to compose myself academically when an old district leader signs up for my class, or his girlfriend signs up the next semester. Ward members who think it will be fun or easy to take my class sign up and label me immoral or disgruntled when I ask them to read essays entitled "Shitty First Drafts" or Tim O'Brien pieces. I do not like finding out I'm dating my students' roommates. I do not like hearing from my roommates that my students want to date me. I do not like having friends tell me they cannot date me because I've been an English teacher to all of their friends.

I get discouraged when one asshole writes in his teaching evaluation, "You drove the point home and were easy on the eyes." I do not like getting other evaluations that end with, "Overall great job, Babe." I am tired and I am finished. Some students plead for an easier workload while others chastise me for making class so mindless and cheap. Some students despise the reading assignments while others remark as an afterthought, "you should have had us read stuff sometimes." Why didn't you give us stricter deadlines? they ask, after I granted them an extension because they begged and begged for an additional weekend. Why all the redundancy about the rhetorical triangle? they ask. It is because your compositions obviously lacked the most simple components and the further I drilled them into your frizzed out, earbudded, selfish minds the better your essays actually became.

The hardest bit of feeling this way towards my classes is that before I know how they truly feel, I really appreciate and enjoy all of them. Yes, these evaluations are the worst I've ever received. But regardless, I really enjoyed my students and tried as well as I could at the time to make class rewarding and interesting. And now I am tired. One idiot a year ago confided in me that when he took my class, he stayed awake by staring at my ass. How the hell am I supposed to engage students in persuasive thesis statements and library research when I am nothing more than a piece of low quality meat to these jerks who ought to know better. I should have taught elementary school. Because at least then I could have avoided these know-it-all 23-year-old boys who just got their trophy wives and learned everything they needed to know on their missions and define their idea of "bringing home the bacon" as undressing their foolish, childish, rambling English instructor in their minds.

And THIS is ALL I will ever say about THAT.