It’s been a year and a half since Covid shut down the world. 9 months since I started teaching for the first time. 3 months since my first year leading a freshmen small group and teaching ended. 3 months since I hit sheer burnout. And now, one week since the end of my season of rest. One week since the once empty college town I lived in has gained thousands and thousands of new people. A few days since Davis is back to the crazy, overwhelming town it always used to be. I have many thoughts and feelings as there has been a crazy amount of changes to my life in this past month alone. This last season has made me so aware of my brokenness, and has humbled me beyond belief.
When I finished my last final of Spring Quarter, I was dead. I was questioning everything. I felt cheated out of my education as I felt like I was no longer putting effort in my own classes. I felt like teaching had revealed to me so much about my pride, boundary issues, and codependent tendencies. The thought of teaching again in the fall made me so anxious because I felt the weight of my brokenness. I felt the weight of how many of my intentions to help and love in reality were bailing people out of the consequences of their own actions. Small or large, acknowledging that many of my desires, from answering texts at whatever time of day to doing people’s homework with them, we’re actually more harmful than good really hurt. I own up to how I failed as a teacher in those regards. But I still wrestle with what healthy boundaries look like, as I still remember how alone I felt trying to study for my classes as a freshmen.
I was super thankful for all the relationships I built at the end, however. It was clear I had done the best I could for my first attempt, and there was lots of fruit to show it.
In addition, my year of being involved on the other side of education made me realize how much I hated the education system. I felt that the system would always hinder me from what I wanted to do, so everything would always suck. I hated tests and numbers and grades. I hated the fact that many of my students were struggling so much and that there was so little I could do. I also realized that I was wearing so many hats, and that freaked me out because I questioned whether I overstepped my role as a teacher since a component of my job was meeting with my students weekly and that was one of my favorite parts. Visiting my old high school exacerbated this and made me fall back into the old ways of thinking that I’d spent most of college unlearning. No, test anxiety is not a hoax for not enough practice. No, a teacher’s main job isn’t just to teach material. Yes, a teacher should be emotionally aware and healthy themselves and empower their students to be also. Timed tests are a joke and a teacher must make space for differences, not impose who they think their students should be on them. Basically all of the above are not things my high school teachers would say are the foundational principles of their classes. My desire to share the Lord’s love through teaching made the dichotomy worse, because I knew that was something my old teachers could never understand. I also remember high school Lea and wanted nothing to do with her life ruled by anxiety anymore. It was a mess.
I spent one week crying and then my one summer class began. It was EDU 120, philosophical and social foundations of education. It was the most depressing thing I’ve ever taken. But my TAs, Dylan and Sergio met me where I was at. I would go on rants in class about how much the system sucked and people would cheer me on. I’d talk about the achievement gap, mental health issues, and why timed tests are a joke. I took my anger and frustration out on every writing assignment and used every video we watched to affirm my worldview of how broken and screwed up our world was. I criticized well-meaning programs, like charter schools. And honestly, it was great. Dylan had no desire to be a teacher and always talked about how the system wrecked his parents and made them burnout. With every statistic that was shown, the core belief in my mind that burnout was my inheritance reiterated itself over and over again. So why try if it will never be enough anyways?
I felt all this for a while until I realized I needed to make a choice. There was so much I was never going to be able to change about education. And for me personally, I needed to accept that life would always be extremely hard. It was up to me to change my perspective. I could choose to make the most of what I was given and be obedient to the Lord’s call on my life, and through that also receive his joy and peace in the midst of hardship. Or I could be a rock and never get out of bed.
But I still felt so broken. And deep inside, although I loved teaching, I was still a child with an innate desire to be taught. To be taught well. To be seen and known as a student. I didn’t know if I was in any place to give that, if I still felt like there was so much I didn’t know myself.
I wanted to be a rock and never get out of bed, or a golden retriever, but halfway through the summer class I stopped writing depressing papers. For every depressing topic I wrote a paper infused with optimism and hope. I was committed to not losing the war in my mind. To not losing hope. To not losing my faith or myself. I found joy through Zumba classes and really good food. And the most unlikely church internship filled my soul and gave me a place to serve outside of the capacity I was used to, while also allowing me to find myself as a leader once again. It was a Sunday only commitment that was more focused on empowering the interns than it was making us do stuff.
On the first day, I met Faheemah, who was an education professor at my school. She was doing the internship with us because she wanted to learn more about God. That made my jaw drop.
It was clear I was in the right place. One day while setting up, I cried over a conversation with a friend named Ryan about all of my pushover tendencies. I wrestled with whether or not I wanted to be a teacher, but seemed to be surrounded by them. This church had a robotics teacher named Jerry, a former elementary school teacher who was also a teacher of teachers named Kathleen, a guy who taught a high school class on medical skills named Doug who was married to Laureen, a 3rd grade teacher, and a gal named Dion who taught yoga.
I also used this opportunity to explore many different avenues of serving in a church, and shadowed Ben The Production Guy in the beginning. We were meeting for church outside in Central Park at the time, and one day while setting up I ran up to the sidewalk to pet a giant dog. A gal on a run stopped, made eye contact with me, and said hi. I looked up and screamed.
“Mrs. Brashear!” I exclaimed. I wrapped her in a giant hug. She was a favorite high school teacher of mine and commuted from Davis to my hometown. I did not see her when I visited my high school because she had been on maternity leave.
“Hi Lea! That’s right, you’re in Davis.”
“Yes, this is my home. I’m probably going to be a teacher now, actually!”
“Really? Well the great thing about teaching is the students. I’m sure you’ve already heard everything bad about the field.”
I nodded profusely and laughed. I told her about the teacher I visited who said the primary goal of a teacher was to teach the material.
“Okay yes. Lea, he has kind of gone that direction in the last few years but we’ve been trying to pull him out of it.”
We talked for a bit and then agreed to hang out later. She would end up giving me what she used to study for one of my teaching exams. I would later find out she lived one street over from me, get to meet her beautiful baby, and pet her calico cat. It was a God thing to just run into her like that.
I was mostly stressed because I had two key decisions to make in the next year: whether I would teach again, and whether or not I would step down from leading in DCF. I knew I couldn’t teach and lead at the same time, at least not on my own or the same way I was trying to do it last year. My heart desired slowness, to build deep friendships, and to actually try in school my senior year. Again, I too had an innate desire to be lead and to be taught well, and had no desire to teach or lead out of some lack or void in my heart. To make this decision even harder, I had no idea if the grant that funded the class I taught this year would be given again. Dr. E had estimated a 30% probability that it would happen, due to lack of communication on the grant people’s part. It seemed like a complete setup for disappointment to hope, but I had full peace about the grant. Honestly, I had full peace about not teaching again. I would have to find another job, yes, but who knows what doors may open. In my head the grant would not get funded again and I would end up in a new job that was a better fit for me than teaching. One that I was perhaps a little bit better at. One that was perhaps easier.
Around halfway through the internship, I was tearing down with Ben the Production Guy when I ditched my post to pet a giant poodle. Jess, one of my fave grad students heard my voice and came to pet the poodle with me. She was hanging out with her boyfriend and all his physics grad student friends. We had a deep, depressing conversation about how much we hated academia, how we didn’t know what we were doing with our lives, and how we felt tired and burned out.
“Jess,” I said. “If Dr. Enderle comes back to me and says this grant has been funded for another year, even though right now we’re pretty sure it won’t happen, I don’t think I would say yes. It’s my senior year. I want to be present and actually try in my classes and learn from them. I want to be present in my home and my community. I want it to be mine.”
Jess nodded slowly while petting the poodle. “Yeah, and honestly Lea, I don’t think anyone would blame you for that. You did the best job last year out of everyone. And you deserve to do what is best for you.”
The next day, after a month and a half of waiting, I saw a slack message from Dr. Enderle to the TA group chat.
“Great news. The grant has been approved for just one more year!” A bunch of confetti emojis followed it.
I stared at it for a solid 3 minutes. And then 5. And then 10.
Lea, are you seriously going to deprive yourself of the thing you love most in your last year of college? Teaching has been so good for you. You’ve grown so much. You will not make the same mistakes you did last year. The only way to learn how to do this is by doing it.
I took a deep breath. Sometimes the things we think we need are not what we need. Sometimes the things that are best for us do not look like they are simply because they are hard. Just because teaching was hard did not mean it was bad for my mental health. Just because teaching had many unknowns did not mean it was toxic for my life. Perhaps all the lessons I learned and difficulties I faced in my first 2 quarters teaching were the miracle.
There was no way to know if the outcome would be good if I said yes. Teachers have no control over who enters their classes. It’s something someone else has to choose. And my eyes were fixed on the word in my boss’s message, last. It was the last year the grant would be here. If I didn’t teach this year I would regret it forever.
Lea, can you trust me for one more year? I felt the Lord saying.
It makes us better human beings to do things that are hard. To step out in vulnerability. To chase meaning over comfort.
There is no way I’m not saying yes.
I breathed a sigh of relief. Peace flooded my body with my decision to teach again, and that made me certain it was from Him.
Over a rock climbing adventure with my boss and his son, I’d find out there was just enough funding for me and another TA. It only worked because I was an undergrad and had a different designation than a real TA on paper. They couldn’t hire two real TAs. It had to be me and another person.
My hands were jacked after bouldering with them and then we got boba. As we drove back to my place I asked my boss, “Did you have any idea when you first met me in my EMT uniform on that zoom call that it would lead to all of this?”
He nodded slowly. “And we had no idea it would happen again.”
This boss of mine loves chemistry but also Jesus. And I just hope He’s aware that the only reason anything has ever worked out in regards to me teaching for him is a reflection of God, not me.
~
10 weeks later of set up, tear down, getting lunch together, and having extremely deep theological discussions, the Lord had given me another family outside of the fellowship I was already in and an abundance of supernatural rest and peace. The internship had filled me spiritually and equipped me with the tools I needed for whatever season of leading I would encounter next.
You cannot pour old wine into new wineskins, or they will burst. I was certain the Lord was reminding me that He was the new wineskin. The new things and the good things could only come from him. It was better to be a broken vessel, and I needed to trust that God was making all things new. That He sees me. And that He was still healing me.
After finishing the summer class and the internship, I decided I would give teaching another chance. I registered to take the chemistry CSET, one of the exams I would need to pass in order to teach high school chemistry. I told my friend Joy this and she was shocked.
“I thought you didn’t want to be a teacher.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You literally said at the beginning of the summer you were quitting teaching and going to become a psychologist instead.”
I smiled. I did say that. Because one of the ways I cope with unknowns is by dreaming of the future. And what better way to dream about the future than glamorize the idea that having a masters in counseling would make it so I would never encounter any unknowns when holding space for people to be human ever again?
“Sometimes it’s not about choosing what you’re going to do for the rest of your life. Sometimes it’s about making the next right decision, and honestly teaching is probably it for me. I would love to get a masters in counseling. But I don’t want to be a 20 something year old counselor. So I’ll save that dream for later.”
The last half of my summer consisted of a trip to So-Cal, a wedding, and lots of meeting with people. Davis’s scorching hot weather, final intern celebrations, and leadership meetings transitioned naturally into the beginning of school. I volunteered to help freshmen move in their dorms, met with even more people, painted DCF A frames, and worshipped my face off. I watched campus go from quiet and peaceful to insanely hectic and crowded, which was how I always remembered it.
On one of these days me and my friend Anthony teamed up to flyer at the big football game. The second we walked in, I was freaking out. Anxiety clenched my stomach and I was pretty sure I was going to have a panic attack. There was no way I would go up to any random people in the swarm and invite them to DCF. In my head nobody listened to street preachers, and nobody came to know a God of love by coercing someone to take a flyer from you.
“Come on Lea! Step out of your comfort zone a little bit. We’re already here, we might as well give our flyers.”
I wanted to die.
With no desire to approach anyone, Anthony, then introvert between the two of us, just kept approaching people. Once he started a conversation, we could keep it going. I forced myself to go up to random people. Some were not open, but most people were. It appeared that everyone had this desire to belong and to be seen at such a big school. I started asking the Lord to highlight people to us and did my best to listen underneath the clenching, anxiety driven pile of unrest that consumed my body.
One of the gals I approached, Sarai, was so shocked after we talked to her.
“No way. I was literally looking for a Christian community to be a part of,” she said, in shock.
A few other people said similar things. I see Saraii making friends and getting more involved and cannot believe it.
But what the real miracle was not the people that happened to think we came up to them at the perfect time. The miracle was that the Lord had used this flyering experience to remind me that anxiety did not rule my life. This, Lea. This is what it means to feel so anxious you want to die, and still press in and be obedient.
There are times when you feel so anxious you want to die and you truly do need to stop and get some rest. And there are other times when you feel so anxious you want to die and you actually need to press in. To face it head on. To feel it, in all of its discomfort, and still move forward. Anthony and I realized that the hardest part was starting. Sometimes when you feel the most uncomfortable, you just need to begin somewhere, or anywhere. And as you begin, you realize you have the strength to begin again and again.
~
My first week of school was amazing. I already love all of my teachers. I got to cut open a sheep brain in one of them and have loved every single classmate I have met so far.
My EDU 181 teacher right away made me feel deeply seen and known. Her name was Ingrid. She had short, grey hair, and a gentle smile. Her demeanor was poised and she had a lively energy to her walk, yet also carried a deep openness and willingness to be vulnerable. Every word that exited her mouth made it seem like she understood my entire life despite the fact that I had just met her. This would be the class where I would get to intern at a middle school while also uncovering new layers of what it meant to be a teacher. From the second I walked in, everyone was so friendly. Everyone I had met in my other 3 classes that day had been so friendly. But this teacher made me laugh so hard and think so deeply all at the same time.
I hadn’t met anyone who is the kind of teacher I want to be yet, to be honest. I was coming into this class after my summer of slowly healing and deciding to give teaching another chance. I desired to be a teacher that cared about equity and accessibility. One that was culturally informed and aware of mental health. One that wasn’t like some of my high school teachers, who still think test anxiety is a hoax for not enough practice. One that wasn’t so caught up in my own pride and privilege that I imposed my idea of what a student should be on them. And you can be well meaning and do both of the above. But I still felt like nobody understood these desires or these struggles. And my dilemma about whether or not I wanted to go into education was so complicated I was certain nobody could understand it.
Ingrid introduced herself as someone who double majored in German and chemistry. My head immediately perked up. A chemistry teacher? Passionate about social justice? That cares about accessibility? Haven’t met one of those ever. She was so open in how she shared her life with us. She emphasized the importance of building community. I wanted to jump out of my seat and scream at all the people who would say building community was outside the role of a teacher. She told us that she hoped the class would make us critical of the education system we were brought up in, but not so much so that we quit on it because we were needed. Is she reading my mind? I had nearly fallen into that trap, or was still trying to wrestle my way out of it.
“I am getting a little old and want to retire soon. So you guys give me hope for the future of education. You guys give me hope that it will change,” she said to us.
She came over to the group I was in as we talked about what the purpose of education should be. I talked about how I’ve been thinking a lot about how education shouldn’t be about teachers imposing their idea of students onto them, but teachers giving students space to find who they are. A group member further commented on this, and then I said, “Yeah, I don’t ever want to become one of those teachers who are only drawn to students who are smart.” I’ve had so many well-meaning teachers do that. Heck, I’ve fallen into that trap myself. I turned to Ingrid, who was standing at the edge of our table.
“Yeah. Honestly, the students I was most drawn to were the ADHD kids or the ones who were really struggling. That’s definitely a huge problem in education, but you will see when you shadow a class that you won’t be like that.”
Now was my chance. “So you were a chemistry major?” I spit out.
“Yep!”
“So did you teach chemistry?”
“Yes, I did, and then I stopped because the method of teaching it was too rigid for me. But I did for a while!” My jaw nearly dropped from feeling validation.
“Omygosh. Long story short, I teach chemistry. I feel so seen right now. I haven’t met any high school chemistry teachers that acknowledge equity and accessibility.”
“Haha well I hope you meet more. So are you a chemistry major?”
“Nope!”
“What are you majoring in?”
“Biological psychology.”
“Wow. That’s awesome. That’s amazing.”
After a lot of incredible discussions, a lot of shared laughter with classmates, and just 2 hours of sheer joy with all these people I had never met, she stayed after class for anyone who wanted to stay. I figured I’d ask her how to study for the general science CSET because that was the one thing I felt like was going to kill me.
“I was just wondering if you knew how to study for the general science CSET,” I said.
“Honestly, it’s not that hard. But I can tell you’re probably a perfectionist with some OCD, so you’ll be freaking out about it anyways.”
I started laughing. “So how did you know that? Because you are absolutely right.”
She paused. “Hmm, I don’t know. It’s hard to say what allowed me to know. I’ve been teaching for 31 years so I really pick up on those things. But yeah, even when you were discussing the prompt with your group you were saying things like ‘things should be this way’ and ‘it shouldn’t be this way.’ So I can tell you have expectations of what things should look like, and that must cause a lot of anxiety.”
Damn. She was right.
“I’ve had some people come through my class who gave up on education because of their perfectionistic tendencies. They really let the system get to them and felt like it would never look the way they wanted it to, so they quit.”
Wow. That was me.
I shared a lot of my story with her then. She learned how I got the job I have now. She learned about my test accommodations for anxiety. I told her about my high school teachers who think test anxiety is a hoax for not enough practice. She validated and affirmed that many people do believe that, but we can’t make generalizations about things we don’t understand. She loved the fact that my boss changed my title on paper to make it sound like I wasn’t teaching in order to hire me on.
“Can I ask what your accommodations are for?” She asked me.
“Oh! Anxiety. I get extra time and get to take my exams in a separate room.”
She nodded slowly. “Yup. It’s the perfectionism that drives the anxiety, and that can make it super difficult to learn and especially take exams. You’ve probably had a lot of issues with boundaries and stuff like that.”
Boundaries. What a joke. Yes, that has been the struggle of my life lately.
“And also you still give your number to students. So many people have told me not to do that, but I still do that!” I exclaimed.
“Honestly, many people have told me not to also. But I still do. I love it. Nobody really abuses it.”
“I think for me I responded a little too quickly to some messages last year and did create some codependency. So that was on me. But I still want to give out my number. I also prefer it,” I said, shocked.
I left her room that day extremely in awe of God. Of course, I would never teach exactly like her. I was me. But today I finally met a teacher who understood me.
This. This is how school should be. A place that feels open. A place where you feel seen. A place where you can ask hard questions. A place where you can find community.
~
Nothing about teaching this quarter went as planned. I expected to have around 15-20 students, but only had 4 in the beginning. This freaked me out. And then the room I had didn’t have a cord that fit into my laptop to project my screen. So I bought a cord, and it turned out to be the wrong cord. That day I had to teach with a chalkboard and could barely add numbers, and although I would later find out the grad students also found what I could barely teach that day confusing, it was still the most embarrassing thing of life. I was freaking out because I had no control over who would register for my class. But I just kept praying and praying, believing that God would put the people in my class who needed to be in it the most with me. Because I taught last year, I had an idea of what it may look like. But 4 students turned to 7, and my 7 were a completely different group of students than he ones I had last year. There was a much more diverse group of majors and I did not have mostly pre-meds this year. I would not be able to help them in the same way I did last year with 4 year plans and stuff because of that. What I had to give to this group of students would look different. Their needs were different too.
After my “I can’t add or subtract negative numbers with the correct sig figs” debacle, in my mind the world was ending. And this is why you cannot teach.
And this is the work that I have to do: realizing that my mistakes are not a sign that the world is ending, that things are still worth doing even if we do them very imperfectly. I need to know this in not just my teaching career but my entire life. I need to know that God placed me where I am and knows what He’s doing far better than I do. I get it wrong every day, but he’s right every single time.
Lea
lea faith 