To Courtney, With Love

The new English teacher—the fourth one in less than three years—looked like a punky Tinkerbell.

She wore her starlight blonde hair pulled into a bun, big oversized glasses perched on her upturned nose (the kind of cute nose I always wished I had) with a dainty twinkling stud. Despite her scarf, a tattooed comet of Fall Out Boy lyrics flowed across her shoulder with a spray of falling stars.

Thirteen-year-old me would’ve loved having a punky Tinkerbell for an eighth grade English teacher.

Our department chair suggested Courtney follow me to ISS so we could chat about teaching and the school and help her acclimate. Instead, sitting in the yellowed square room with mismatched desks, we swapped life stories. I’d been teaching for five years, which included being laid off from my first school district. This would be her first teaching job. My boyfriend and I were wrestling with the long-distance problems a military relationship inspires. Courtney was married with two young boys, one of whom she had been pregnant with while she completed her student teaching (I couldn’t even begin to imagine how hard that was). Besides our mutual love of Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco, we discovered our birthdays were exactly a week apart and that we once had tutored at the same place (although not at the same time). We had taken two very different paths to the same job, but we had the same heart.

We were officially best friends in about ten minutes.

Afterwards, Courtney came to my class to observe me teach. I was excited. I loved welcoming people into my classroom, and Courtney was the first person my age to ever watch me teach, and that was cool. Most of my best friends had no idea what I was like in teacher mode.

By observing me and the other English teacher, she could get a better feel of what it was like to teach thirty thirteen-year-olds for eighty-four minutes. Then Courtney started a week later: her first official teaching job.

Everyone says the first year of teaching is the worst. They’re right. What no one tells you is that while student teaching shows you what it’s like to teach, it doesn’t prepare you to run your own classroom.

On my first day of my first year, I timidly asked the other English teacher for help. “Could you help me understand literature circles?” I asked while we sat in the tiny, angular staff room for lunch. “I’ve never successfully done them.”

The other teacher snorted, her eyebrows raised. “Didn’t you go to college?”

Lesson learned: Don’t ask for help.

Later in the first week, I was making copies in the library, and another teacher asked how it was going. I smiled, papers churning out from the clunky machine, and admitted my last class at the end of the day was my worst group, but really it was all very good.

The next day, when that same group of hectic minions burst out of my room, my assigned mentor, a seventh-grade teacher, strode in and shut the door.

“What did you tell someone about how your classes were yesterday?”

I stopped straightening the chairs and recounted the conversation in the library.

She pursed her lips. “Well, now the entire school is talking about how you can’t manage your classroom.”

Lesson learned: Never tell anyone you’re less than fine.

“We’ll figure it out,” my mentor teacher said, not unkindly. “I’ll come observe, figure out what’s going on, and I’ll help you. But don’t tell anyone you’re not fine, okay?”

She left. I sat at a desk covered in curse words and cried.

With one exception—the day in March I was laid off due to budget cuts—I did not cry again for ten months. Somehow, I made it through the school year with my head held high. There’s some truth in that Bob Marley quote about not knowing your own strength until it’s your last option. I had to get through the school year. I. Had. To. I did not leave the classroom unless I was prepared for the next school day, and that often meant not leaving until after five. Once I was corralled into assisting the drama club, that usually meant not leaving until after seven.

At first, I thought I did it on my own, but not really.

I became best friends with the Spanish teacher across the hall, who checked on me the same day the mentor teacher left me crying. I was twenty-two, living on my own, hours away from my family, and Nicole basically adopted me as a younger sister. She signed me into PlanetFitness; we paraded around the mall on Friday nights. She helped me be a person with a life, not just a teacher spending ten to twelve hours in her classroom.

At the new teacher orientation, I had become friends with April, a woman in her thirties who had taught in the Bronx. She told me she cried the entire drive home on her first day of teaching, made me promise I’d go to her if I needed anything, and invited me to get my nails done with her at the end of every marking quarter.

The librarians, Doreen and Adriane, helped me throw a Poetry Party for my honors class in the spring.

The literacy coach, Katy, who had the coolest black and green pixie cut and swirling upper arm tattoos, welcomed me into her office, helped me plan units, and never, not once, made me feel dumb.

Danielle, my special education co-teacher, a six-foot tower of power, was my personal cheerleader.

I was making it. And I loved it.

In March, the budget didn’t pass. There weren’t enough votes. So, in order to retain one of the tenured ELA teachers at another building, I had to be let go.

Despite my worst fears of never finding another teaching job, I landed one. A great one: the same grade (eighth), in a small, blooming town close by. I wouldn’t even have to move. When I met with the principal for an informal tour of the building, she gave me a note with a name and a phone number on it.

“Heidi’s one of the other eighth grade English teachers here. She wanted you to call her so you can meet, get ready for the school year, go over any questions you have.”

I was in shock. This woman hadn’ even met me yet and was willing to help me, a total stranger, adjust to a new school.

Heidi is the only reason I survived my second year of teaching.

Three years later, when Courtney arrived, I was (mostly) out of what Heidi called my “chihuahua mode”: me running into her classroom at 6:45 in the morning, wide-eyed and talking a thousand words a minute about questions and lesson plans and what did she think about this? I was no longer in the classroom ten hours a day. I had a gym routine, a boyfriend, and I ate food other than Red Baron’s single-serving frozen cheese pizza. I was an actual person again.

Lesson learned: Don’t let anyone ever feel as alone as you did that first year.

Better lesson: Be like Heidi, whose creativity and classroom management were nothing short of masterful. Heidi, who created a review/summary activity inspired by the cooking TV show Chopped: In groups, students had to create and present a summary of a different chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird, and each group had to use a mystery ingredient like a song or award. Heidi, who never once complained or belittled me for the frenetic, anxiety-riddled person I was during that first school year with her.

By the time Courtney arrived, I was doing my best to pass on the same support and encouragement. For mysterious and complicated reasons, the third eighth grade English teacher was new every year, and I wanted to welcome them as warmly as Heidi had welcomed me. There was no denying that Courtney would have a rough first year of teaching—by law, the first year of teaching is rough—but what matters is who sees you through it.

Courtney had one rough year, that was for sure. I did not envy her the group of students she had inherited. Along with Heidi, of course, I did my best to help her through. By the end of that school year, our best friendship had more than solidified, and by a stroke of life, Courtney was hired for the following school year.

When I initially arrived in the district, everyone was very warm and friendly. But there’s a difference between everyone being nice to you, and watching everyone sit with their best friends at faculty meetings, and wondering where you should sit.

Lesson learned: Professional development days are infinitely better with your best friend.

For our second year together, Courtney and I decided to create and run a “writing bootcamp” to start the school year. We texted throughout the evenings. We took turns walking to the Dunkin’ down the street and delivering coffee to each other (much to the envy of the eighth graders). That fall, my boyfriend departed for Afghanistan, and Courtney discovered she was unexpectedly expecting. Heidi, Courtney, and I dressed up as characters from a short story for Halloween. After listening to me ramble about my obsession with onesies as Halloween costumes, Courtney surprised me with not one but two fuzzy onesies for Christmas.

Then Covid struck, and at the end of the 2020 school year came the two life situations we’d been talking about the entire year.

Courtney was on the job hunt once again, as the district had cut down spots, indirectly caused by the pandemic.

I was moving four hours away. I was leaving the district to finally start a life with my beloved boyfriend (now delayed in Afghanistan).

Both of us worried. For Courtney, would she be able to find a steady teaching job? She’d been hired as a leave replacement the last two years, which meant the end of the year was nothing but uncertain. Teaching was easier when you weren’t starting over every year, and she wanted to settle into her own classroom, her own place, not to mention support and take care of her family. I wasn’t worried about Courtney finding a job. Even as a first year, she was already an excellent teacher when she started, and the last two years had only honed her craft and sharpened her classroom management skills, but Covid-19 was changing everything.

As for me, was I making the right decision in leaving Room 101? I could only leave by accepting there was a chance I’d never teach again. After all, a military lifestyle never guaranteed a job for the significant others. Why would I get a job during a national recession caused by the global pandemic?

It was a hard decision to come to. When I was nineteen years old, all I wanted was to move to a new town, where I didn’t know anyone, and teach. I wanted to prove that I could make it on my own. I wanted to find and create a life for myself the way I wanted to, and that’s exactly what I had done. I was living in a different state than the one I had grown up in; I had moved to a town where I knew no one; I was teaching and living in a place I made my own.

Teaching was wonderful. I loved walking into work every day, greeting my classes, and telling them how excited I was for the day’s lesson, and yes, I knew I said that every day, but I was really excited about today! I loved designing and creating curriculums with Courtney and Heidi. Teaching was not just a creative outlet, but a compassionate one. I had been a student who never raised my hand for fear of embarrassment. I had been a shy student who didn’t know how to ask for help. I never said hi to former teachers because I wasn’t even sure if they remembered me. But I made sure that when we were working independently, or when students read The Outsiders at their own pace, I sat down and had a conversation with every single one. There is no such thing as a perfect teacher, but I was a teacher who loved teaching.

So why was I willing to leave?

It was complicated. It was simple.

I didn’t want my whole life, my whole identity, to belong to teaching. I wanted to be married to the love of my life. I wanted a family. I wanted to write.

I loved my boyfriend.

I was burned out. Year after year, it was harder and harder to make it until summer break.

Lesson learned: When you pour so much of your heart out for other people, you need time to let it replenish itself for the sake of itself.

That’s what teaching was for me. Not a paycheck, not a vocation, but a place where I poured my heart into my lessons and interactions with the students.

So I was willing to leave and see what happened. To see where love and life took me. If I could teach again, great. But if I didn’t, I would rest easy knowing I had taught my best for six years.

And then, Courtney and I both found brand-new, full-time teaching jobs in new districts for the fall of 2020.

It was a no-brainer for both of us. It was what Courtney had dreamed of: her own classroom. Even better, her new job was in the same school district where she had student taught. As for me, having a job was better than having none, especially in a brand-new place where the only person I knew was my boyfriend. I was excited at the thought of teaching seventh grade, which I had loved during my student teaching experience.

There we were: two twenty-eight-year-old women, experienced teachers in our own right, and we were both starting over at brand-new districts without the other.

I don’t remember who had the brilliant idea to talk on the phone on the morning of our first day, but one of us did.

For the last two years, Courtney and I have talked on the phone on our morning commute every single school day (excluding sick days and snow days and other unexpected moments).

Together, we figured out how to teach virtually and six feet apart and while wearing masks. We griped about administration decisions, brainstormed lessons together, shared the hilarious moments that come from teaching teenagers. We both knew the names of our team colleagues and what they taught. In the morning, my colleagues wave to me when I arrive because they know I’m still on the phone with Courtney.

There’s a lot of community-focused conversation in the world of education. The school district is a community of families and teachers and staff who support and educate the students. Teachers need to create a safe community in their classroom. Students benefit from learning as a community, learning to support one another, accept each other’s differences, and focus on their own personal improvement. Lectures about teacher communities to support one another.

Courtney was mine.

By the time I met Courtney, I had figured out who I was as a teacher, but that didn’t mean I didn’t need a support system or that I had it all figured out. It doesn’t matter who taught longer or who had the more challenging caseload of students. If it wasn’t for our friendship, I don’t know how I would have figured out how to teach in a hybrid model or how to run Google Meets. Countless lesson plans met with her approval before I piloted them. For last year’s Halloween, I used Courtney’s Monster Creation Lesson to review and use figurative language.

As a colleague, I am proud to know and work with Courtney. Courtney is a wonderful teacher and mother—and both need to be acknowledged, as for her, the two intertwine. She’s wickedly smart, hilariously sassy, and unendingly generous to her students. As a best friend, she gives the best presents (A Hufflepuff pun shirt! A specially embroidered jacket with my new married last name!). Sometimes, just for the heck of it, we communicate by using only Bridgerton memes. She’s listened to me gush about my boyfriend-turned-husband, vent about my family, and she’s supported me starting my life over again.

I believe we would have still been best friends if our paths had crossed elsewhere, but what makes our friendship so special is that she knows me as a teacher. It’s a part of my life that only my students see.

Her students, past, present, and future, are lucky to have her.

I know I have been.

-D.C. Dubs

D.C. Dubs always wished she could be a princess, but when that didn’t work out, she became an English teacher instead. Outside of teaching, she scribbles short stories and novels. She lives with her new husband in New York.