By, Shem R.W
I didn’t know if I was going to go to college until a few months before I went. I can remember the exact moment that I made the decision, actually; I was working as a grocery clerk at the Sno-Isle Food Co-Op, the summer after I graduated high school. I didn’t really like high school much. I probably only passed my sophomore and junior years because of the grace COVID gave us. At that point I didn’t really like anything at all, and I wasn’t thinking about much. I certainly was not, up until that point, thinking about college.
So there I was, sweeping the organic wine aisle under the cool glow of the alternative milk cooler, listening to something through the earbud that I wasn’t supposed to have in on the floor, and for some reason, for the first time in a long time, I was thinking about my future. What the fuck was I doing? I had absolutely no plan for my life. I was eighteen years old and all I did was get stoned, visit my then-boyfriend in Seattle and work a part-time job where I spent half my shifts vaping in the bathroom. I hadn’t taken my SATs. I hadn’t applied to a single school, and there was no way any of them were going to take me.
But, you know, there was this one place. My dad’s coworkers had heard of my plight and suggested it- they were alumni, of course, because who else would suggest a tiny liberal arts school in the middle of the woods?
What if… but, no. There was no point in going to college unless I knew what I was going to do with my degree. I didn’t want to end up with some made up job like creative director. Okay, so what would I study? Well, to start with, what am I good at? What do I care about? Now I was really thinking. Well, I like to talk. I’m a very political person, and I enjoy learning about the world around me, and learning from other people. I’m good at explaining concepts to others in a way they find engaging, or so I’ve been told. I like…
… Well, I guess I like to teach people.
Yeah, wait, I like to teach people! Maybe not in so many words- for most of my life I would have called it, ‘explaining why I’m right’- but, yeah, I guess I like to teach. And, hey, actually, my grandparents were schoolteachers! Holy shit, do I want to be a teacher?
I had a plan, suddenly, for what I wanted to do with my life- how had I never thought of this before? Of course I wanted to be a teacher, it seemed so obvious looking back, as if my entire life had led up to this. Even putting aside the fact that it is a stable government job that is always in demand and thus I will likely never be underemployed, there are countless other reasons this rings true. So come fall, I was driving the two and a half hours downstate, to go to college, to become a teacher.
That was three years ago. Can anyone tell me some of the things that have changed in the world since then? Raise your hand, and I’ll call on you one at a time.
I’m trans, I’m communist student organizer, I live in the United States of America in 2025, and I want to be a schoolteacher. More specifically, I want to be a social studies teacher. I want to educate seventh to eleventh graders on the world we live in. Since I got to college I have been building up all of these big ideas about what I want to do when I have my own classroom: putting together a library that I can keep on a cart at the back, making Pinterest boards of decor and professional-but-unique office clothing, using every opportunity in my own classes to create slides that I can use down the line… I was never under the impression that it would be easy. Public schoolteaching is not an easy job for any type of person, it is a social work position and has an incredibly high turnover rate. However, when I first decided this was going to be what I do, I’d never imagined that things would get so complicated. I was prepared to white-knuckle it even when the going got tough; I was not prepared for my entire country to essentially tell me to go fuck myself and the life I’ve been building in such an efficient manner.
Things are very different now than when I decided on this path, and I have so very many questions. How will I deal with parents who are uncomfortable with me being in the classroom? I am not what one would call ‘binary’ regardless of what label I choose to use in my personal life, I will always be confusing to people; what will I even ask my students to call me? This has been something I habitually muse about, what honorific I will use, if I will use my last name or maybe just my first, but it was more of a trolley problem than a genuine concern about getting enraged emails from parents or being mandated to use the one associated with my birth sex, which would still cause confusion due to how I look. Any of this could cost me my job if I get one in the wrong school district with the right political demographics. Speaking of losing my job, what happens if a group of ‘concerned parents’ looks my name up online and sees what I was doing in college? I have often dreamed of entwining a more radical education into the required syllabus; you know, having my students read DuBois, maybe a bit of ‘A People’s History of the World’ here and there, talking critically about US foreign policy and its impacts on Latin America and Asia, looking at the ethnic and racial demographics of the student body and including lessons relevant to their social groups, especially as they pertain to class struggle… It’s the little things, you know? How am I supposed to do that, if I am receiving more draconian pressure to teach a sanitized and pro-America version of history that chooses to gloss over all of the most interesting, engaging and ideologically challenging parts of my subject?
And, I know, I know- I’m in Western Washington. I am basically in the best position to be a transsexual communist public schoolteacher that I could be in this country save California. But still, I wonder. And even more than all of that, I worry. I’m sure many others have these worries too. What of trans teachers in red districts? What of Black teachers, what of teachers who are immigrants and Muslim teachers and anyone else who does not fit the normative standard of a middle-aged sports coach teaching history or a pretty blonde woman teaching language arts? And, of course, what of the students, as the education system becomes ever increasingly carceral against students of color and ICE begins to sweep their hallways? How much worse are public schools going to get as government funding begins to be pulled and for-profit private schooling begins to become more dominant as the education model in the United States? Would I even be able to get a job in one, seeing as they tend to be Christian institutions? Will I be able to get a job at all? Even if I live in Washington, we can’t outrun the feds forever…
I’m sure there are many others in my shoes, wondering these same things. I know there are, because I’ve talked to them. People who want to become teachers almost always have a specific passion for it. We want in for the love of the game. But increasingly, it seems, the game will never give a modicum of that love back. I think we are all wondering, collectively: what the fuck are we doing?
But wherever we go, there we will be. Wherever I go I will be trans, and I will bring my politics with me, and those will both present me with challenges in this country and in my workplace. And there are forces out there that would love nothing more than for people like us to just disappear from education and make it that much easier for them to crush any opposition to their jackbooted death march towards fascism. I will still become a teacher, and you should too, if that’s what you want; it is an important, noble, beautiful profession, and we all deserve to be there. At least in the classroom, you will be showing children that there are people like you, and people like them, that there is a life outside of their parents and their current moment, and that there is always another way to think about things. So I will continue building my library. I will continue bookmarking cute Fluevog brogues and learning how to develop an effective seating chart, and again, so should you.
And one day when we’re old and grey- well, hopefully more of a salt and pepper- we’ll look back and we’ll say: Man, am I glad I didn’t give up on that dream. I could have ended up a creative director!
