Literary Pixie

By Sammy Ginsberg

It’s been a long time coming. I resigned from full-time teaching because I burnt out. I went on medical leave twice that year from burn out, and I just needed it to be over.

I didn’t really have a plan of what to do next, I just knew that what I was doing was not working, and that there was a time before teaching when I felt happy, when I felt like myself. Not trapped in survival mode.

I transferred to the substitute teaching unit so that I would have some income, while figuring healing and figuring out what I wanted to do next.

I have been trying to decide if I want to continue in the path of full-time teaching at LAUSD.

I kept thinking that it was the culture of the school, the curriculum and grade-level responsibilities, the commute, the administrators, the ELA/ELD departments, and that if they were different – then teaching would actually be a sustainable role for me. Why do they keep giving 9th graders, full-inclusion, and ELD to one teacher??!?! I’ll never know.

Now that I have worked at five high schools in LA in Woodland Hills, Midcity, Los Feliz, Van Nuys, and North Hollywood as well as took a break to do marketing, event producing, and bookselling again like I did before teaching, I have come to the conclusion that I will be leaving teaching full-time.

I am leaving teaching because:

• not enough time to build trusting relationships or collaborate effectively with admin and colleagues during working hours, and most time spent working with students who leave every year and cannot be trusted as colleagues and friends due to vulnerability and power-dynamics
• the social interaction with 100 students every day leaves me too tired to enjoy my personal life, research and work on my writing and creative projects, engage in adult community, have hobbies, and develop and maintain relationships, and I love having lots of different friends, maintaining old and new friendships, and being engaged in lots of clubs, my hobbies, and going on trips, taking classes, and learning new things! 
• having to do daily public speaking and engaging in high conflict situations and setting boundaries on a daily basis, which are weaknesses of mine and thus leave me feeling like my strengths are not being expressed and that I’m never good enough and exhausted
• frequently having to deviate from the routine and structure, improvise, or use lesson plans that I’m not confident or make new ones triggering my anxiety and not meeting the needs of my nervous system and being forced to teach curriculums and grade-levels that I know I do not have the capacity or resources or training or support to teach.
• Not able to share about my writing and poetry because of its adult content.

I am burning out again, and will always be burning out. I have a sensitive nervous system, and this job is constantly overwhelming my nervous system.

My chronic stress is getting to the point that I had excessive ear wax growth and had muffled hearing all of my spring break until I got a ear lavage. Damn that felt good.

Did you know that ear wax grows quicker when you are stressed!!!? And that they can measure your cortisol levels in your ear wax.

I was telling everyone that it was happening again, that I was having the same mental health issues again and that if things didn’t change, I was going to leave.

Well, the body knows and made sure I listened.

It has been 5 years of feeling this way. Five years! I am proud that I have survived this long as a teacher, but also, fuck!! Five years of living in survival mode feeling chronic overwhelm and stress to the point feeling taken advantage of by our society.

One of my ways of living is – how can I make this the best thing that ever happened to me?

I am going to learn from this.

From this experience, I have learned what I need in my next job:

• Time built into work for collaborating and team building with a long-term commitment to working together as a team and getting to know each other as people
• Less social interaction
• Less public speaking
• Less direct conflict and accountability working with people who do not have a choice about being in my classroom and learning from me
• More time doing my strengths: organizing, planning, writing, reading, assisting people and supporting them in their goals, maintaining structure and order, creating and strategizing from data, researching, interviewing, producing events
• More time to plan and get trained on my responsibilities before having to lead on my own without support in a public setting.

I also am grateful to know my purpose as well as to have deep knowledge and insight into our education system and the motivation to see my challenges, as opportunities for professional/personal growth (thanks Fam!).

I am deeply passionate and committed to improving the communication between the education, entertainment, healthcare, government, and information systems – specifically the teaching of life-long literacy skills, and the role that media/culture makers, libraries, museums, schools, corporations, and government play in managing and preserving the infrastructure and information used to teach people those skills and access the information they need to apply their literacy skills to improving their quality of life and maintaining their health, happiness, and wellbeing and that of their communities.

My friend Brian and I are launching a nonprofit to address this gap in our current society called 21st Century Writers.

I am so so excited to spend my time working on this, and am trying to figure out how to do this work and live in Los Angeles!

This city is expensive!!!

As well as how to best pivot out of the long-term substitute position I am currently assigned until June.

That will be my next blog post, as school starts up again on Monday. I communicated with the school that I would get to spring break and then decide. I was meant to tell them yesterday, but did not.

I need to tell them today.

Will I be returning? The next post – the pivot plan!