Survivor's Guilt

Like many of you around the country, I have been listening to a great amount of news coverage this week on the 10 year anniversary of 9/11. Having been here in New York City on 9/11, these conversations have given me a sort of personal pause; I have been reflecting on what the last 10 years have meant to me. The ten year anniversary of 9/11 also coincides with my teaching career: ten of my eleven years in the classroom were at Cobble Hill, a school that became my second home. It was on my second day of teaching my classes that the planes hit, and all my memories of that day are tied to my old school.

Teaching in a struggling inner city school is the work of civil servitude in the truest sense of the word. No, teachers don't run into burning buildings like firemen, but they do challenging and seemingly impossible work on a daily basis that fosters a sense of "brotherhood" (to steal from the firemen) between them. The united struggle of working in such a school becomes a twisted badge of pride--a deserved one.

In the last ten years, a handfull of us stayed at our school through the administrative upheavals and many new people joined the faculty that continued to be the fabric that held the school together. These teachers have watched me grow as a person and as a teacher. They have celebrated my marriage with me, the birth of my two children, and the completion of my never-ending doctoral work. They let me cry when I lost our first pregnancy and had to continue to teach a class of eight pregnant seniors, when my close friend died, and when the frustrations of the job became too much. We were a very close staff, and one of the things I am most proud of as an educator were the respectful, loving, friendly, and caring relationships we modeled for our students. We supported each other in an unsupportive environment.

The teaching profession employs a lot of war metaphors. Those of us in hard schools consider it "the trenches" compared to the selective fancy schools. When I emailed my colleagues that I was leaving Cobble Hill several wrote back saying, "You did your time." Therefore I guess this feeling of survivor's guilt that I am having right now fits right in.

Although I will be working with the same student population (just one year later in their educational trajectory), there is a part of me that feels I deserted my people when I left my school; I deserted the profession that I had so zealously advocated for throughout the years. I feel like public education of the poor right now is a sinking ship, and somehow I jumped and survived. And I feel guilty.

I know they will all be fine without me, that they will keep working and crying and laughing and drinking and teaching and thinking and making the best of the broken system they are a part of. I know it was definitely my time to go. What I don't know is when I will stop feeling like somehow I escaped and left them behind.