Johnny Bravo quits his job [trigger warnings: long, melancholy, sanctimonious]

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I quit my job a while ago.

For a very long time - almost as long as I’ve been a member of these boards - I’ve been a teacher in programs for at-risk kids. I’ve spent my entire professional career desperately trying to mitigate (not fix, not undo, not solve) the carnage that our society inflicts on its most vulnerable members. You know how we talk about kids ‘falling through the cracks’? Do you know where they end up afterwards? Hi, hello, with people like me.

No bragging here. The job beat me. I lost. TKO.

I’ve taken a pay cut, but I have an office with a door I can close whenever I want. I have two (two!) huge windows with a really nice view. I work in a lovely office with lovely people.

Plus, the odds that someone I interact with daily will be arrested or beaten or murdered have gone way down. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

I’ve been a frog in slowly boiling water, except the pot was full of other frogs who have been abandoned by a system that was supposed to have nurtured and protected them.

So yeah. I left. And ever since then, I’ve been slowly exhaling. Slowly realizing how wound up I was. How tightly I’d contracted around my own core. How I wasn’t really joking when I’d joke about having a coal-fired engine where my heart used to be.

I love you all, and I hope every one of you will take more time to practice mindfulness. I hope none of you are in your own pots and, if you are, I hope you take the time to realize it and to take the healthy steps you and yours deserve.

And I’m angry at almost all of you, because I know almost nobody’s putting in the work. Not the real work. Not the grinding, melancholy, desperate work that’s nine losses for every win. I know this because if everyone did it, nobody would need to. Schools like mine are symptoms of too many people choosing not to give a shit.

If you’re getting ready to explain your status as the exception, stop. Exhale. It’s okay. If you are, you don’t have to explain yourself to an internet stranger. If you aren’t, I’m not going to bother explaining how your performative feel-good actions are ultimately useless. I’m sure you mean well. It’s the thought that counts, right? ha ha ha no not really the thought is fucking meaningless and children are dying every day

So that’s it. My days are now filled with the tiniest, least consequential problems you can think of. Like how I don’t have local admin rights on my computer, or choosing the right plants to put in my office, or how people in the parking garage seem to be really bad at parking in just one space. I love it.

I don’t have a satisfying conclusion for this post! Much like my career, I’ll let it end abruptly and in the middle of

2

I’m going to go for a bike ride. What’s your bike ride?

3

You did not lose. You survived for a long time against incredible odds, doing work that desperately needs doing in the name of common humanity, and that, as you point out, all too few of us have the common humanity to undertake. You are fully entitled to a long and recuperative second career filled with the most minor problems ever encountered.

Shit, dude, the military lets servicemembers retire after 20 years active duty, and a substantial percentage of those people aren’t dealing with anything like the day-in, day-out, year-in, year-out devastating societal trauma that you were responsible for dealing with every day. (War zone service excepted, of course, but most servicemembers don’t spend anywhere near 20 years in actual war zones.)

4

There may be some people who can spend their whole lives doing work like that but even with them I’m sure there’s usually a heavy toll. The shame is that you had to take a lower paying job to get a break from it. There should have been just as good of a job for you to move into after giving so much of your life to such work to begin with. Maybe had you been able to change jobs for a year or two earlier on you might have been able to go back and resume what you were doing before.

I don’t think you were beaten by the job, it’s not a mark in the loss column. You won by doing it for the time you did, and we all lose because of a system that didn’t treat you and others better for your noble effort.

5

Even long time teachers on classrooms are tapping l out. I’ve got a lot of teacher friends, particularly in the high poverty area of Nashville that we live in and where my youngest goes to school. And it breaks their hearts to see how some of these kids fall through the cracks. And they try to help, but they aren’t given support from the educational system, the parents can’t do as much, and they have their own families to take care of too. I respect and admire anyone that teaches, and know it’s not something I could ever do.

I also know that I have failings as a parent that can make their lives harder, even if I don’t try to. My youngest is on the spectrum, and usually presents as neuro-typical. There are times I just can’t fight with him about homework anymore because I’m far too tired to do so. It’s a different type of at risk, and I only have one, so I can imagine you getting tired.

You deserve to have a job that doesn’t stress you out all day every day. And it sounds like you’re there. You’ve paid your dues, my friend. You’ve paid your dues as well as everyone else’s for awhile.

6

I think you have not been TOK’d - by no means …

nobody expected you to solve these problems … the analogy I’d use is being a sandbag in a dike that helps prevent flooding …

nobody expects a single sandbag to stop flooding … you do as much as you can - and others (on different levels/intensities/engagement levels) do similar work …

you did your job (and mightily fine, I “sense”) as long as you could - and now you have a different job

you can’t run a marathon like you run 100m dash.

unwind, look up, live your life … there are some 8.000.000.000+ people who can help …

7

It starts off feeling alive, meaningful, that you’re jumping into the river and rescuing the babies, to the best extent that you can, babies that some asshole upriver somewhere is apparently flinging into the river.

Then it gets discouraging because the never-ending stream brings a never-ending array of drowning babies, and you aren’t, of course, successfully rescuing most of them, just a few here and there, and that asshole isn’t slowing down. So somebody’s gotta go upstream and poleaxe the sunnuvabitch.

So you put on your Don Quixote armour and saddle up your mighty donkey and you ride upstream to do justice in this world, to be the arm of righteousness, a policy maker, rather than a direct-practice-with-the-clients kind of worker as you’ve been doing.

And in your encounters with the windmills you meet, you discover after awhile that it isn’t that you always lose that’s the most frustrating. It’s that neither the windmills nor the onlooking crowds take any notice of your attempt. They have no idea why you’re attired in this ridiculous costume and it never crosses their mind that you are on a campaign to end the baby-flinging. Or to do combat with the windmills. Or whatever. You aren’t comprehensible to them and you have no impact whatsoever. But now of course you also aren’t rescuing any babies.

– AHunter3, former social worker in elder abuse and psychiatric patients’ rights advocate

offers Johnny Bravo his choice of intoxicants in commiseration

8

Damn, isn’t that great? It’s hard not to feel shallow, but I tell myself I’d be useless to anyone if I still had my old job.

And I think this bears repeating…

9

My youngest was on the autism spectrum. I’m so grateful to folks like you and others that helped make her 18 years on this earth as good as they possibly could have been.

You mentioned losing 9 times out of 10. I hope it gives you comfort that you helped mitigate the 10%.

10

I’m not looking to argue, but I am curious exactly what type of work it is you are thinking most people aren’t willing to do.

11

Thanks for the kind words, folks. They mean an awful lot.

That’s good.

12

@Johnny_Bravo, aren’t you the one who worked for Job Corps? If you are, I used to work with a woman (Christine RIP) whose sister was a recruiter for them, and she loved her job, except for one thing: 90% of her time was actually dealing with parents who wanted to know, “Is there anything you can do to get my kid off the couch?”

Anyway, if you weren’t (and I’ve told this story here before, and will spoiler it for obvious reasons) the teachers who worked at the alternative school in my old town said, to a person, that they believed in mandatory sterilization as a condition of admittance to that “school.” A woman I know who has taught at a regular high school for many years to whom I told that story said that the alt-schools here have stricter rules, so kids won’t WANT to go there. This was a facility that didn’t do lesson plans or take attendance, but was simply a Federally mandated waste of resources “to keep kids in school until they’re 16 years old.”

13

Same. If you are angry at most of us, I’m curious why? What is the work that we are all not doing?

14

I have no difficulty relating to someone who sometimes experiences the entire rest of the species human as “Them” and feels like holding us all responsible for our collective behaviors.

15

as someone who went to school up until my 2nd year of hs with those kids it didn’t surprise me that 90 percent of them were in some sort of correctional facility by high school the sad thing was some of them did have parents and people that did care but were so far along on the road to life sentences overdoses and the like that even if I believed in god I knew even he couldn’t save them

16

Society let these kids down, and what is society if not all of us?

Johnny Bravo, I’m glad you’re getting a chance to breathe.

17

“If you gave money to ten beggars and nine were lying to you, you have done a good thing.” - Maimonides

18

I do similar work as Johnny. The type of school that averages a student death from violence every year. Students that face addiction, homelessness, deportation, gang violence issues every day. And of course dealing with two years of quotidian exposure to covid and yes, having a day I go to work and never come home is a real possibility. I’m getting close to following Johnny out the door and interestingly it is not because of the students or their situations. I love that part of a job where, as a teacher, I am making a difference in student lives. Even if it being the only place they feel safe for an hour or to let them know that someone in their lives values them and is happy to see them. The reason I would leave is because I work in a state who’s attitude by both reds and blues is, “Fuck teachers. They and what they do is unimportant.” Facing that all of the time is what is beating me down.

19

I don’t know if it helps, but I hear you, and think about my own work in this way: do what you can until you can’t any more, and then it’s okay to take a break for as long as you need.

I agree that too many folks don’t do what they can, and that folks who are willing to shoulder the burden end up shouldering too much of it. That’s really frustrating. But thanks for shouldering what you could, and there’s no shame at all in putting the load down.

20

@Johnny_Bravo, my son was one of your students. He put us all through a lot of things when he was a teenager, after his dad died. If it’s any comfort, he’s now 27, with a long-term girlfriend, two kids, an apartment, and a lucrative job (air-conditioning repair). He really seems to be on track now. I honestly don’t know how much influence you may have had, but for you to help him get a high school diploma and show him a good male role model, it means a lot to me. Thank you.