On School and Trauma

CW: I’m obviously not an expert in mental health; these observations are based on my own experiences as a teacher. As the title indicates, this pieces contains discussions of some potentially upsetting events and trends, including violence against teachers and trauma experienced by teachers and students.

Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on— unchanged and immutable— as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.

—Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., The Body Keeps the Score (2015)

After fifteen years of teaching in South Carolina, I decided not to sign my contract at the end of the 2021-22 school year. And then I came back, anyway, mostly because my wife, also a teacher, had left the profession and we needed the stable income. I decided to give it one more try and I made it through the 2022-23 school year, my sixteenth in the profession. I’m glad I did it, because in a way teaching was a long-term relationship that was very imp…