Jason and I
are constantly amazed – as we share horror stories and emotional traumas from
our current lives – at how many parallels there are between becoming a doctor
and becoming a teacher, between working in medicine and working in education. (That being said, the rest of what is revealed here is entirely thoughts and opinions through my perseonal lens and has been neither endorsed nor confirmed by the aforementioned Jason at the time of this writing.) Even
putting the exhausting supply of liberals aside, a day in the life of a new
teacher is pretty much the exact same thing as a day in the life of a new
doctor, except with less blood, pus, and poo and more drama, hormones, and
post-its. I would be willing to bet that approximately the exact same amount of
hand sanitizer is consumed, and there really should be a word for the school equivalent of a nosocomial infection…I swear we have them!
On the most
basic level, I guess it makes a lot of sense. They’re both “helping” professions,
although without a doubt, as a first year teacher, I am giving less help and needing
more help than any of us is comfortable with. People (patients…students) come
in with a need, a deficiency, perhaps, and it’s up to us to fill the need, to
satisfy the deficiency. And here’s the first obvious and amazing parallel. It
is exhausting and terrifying and stressful to take on that responsibility. If you don’t crack under
the pressure, you must be superhuman. Which leads to the next amazing parallel
we have discovered – we most certainly are not!
Then there’s
the perpetual, unyielding, overwhelming feeling of complete incompetence. But
worse than that is the realization that no one in your immediate professional
surroundings is likely to try to make you feel better about it. Oh, sure, there’s
the off-handed general comment of the most insightful of the experienced class
who will tell you things like, “Yeah, I remember my first year of teaching. It’s
rough.” or “Just remember, everyone is trying to kill your patient,” but somehow all these people just expect you to “get through it,”
much like they did, no doubt, with your head halfway up your ass half the time
because you’re too exhausted to figure out how to get it out, but too committed
to your cause to stop trying. And you look around at all the other people who
are in the same boat, as you rush past them in the halls (hospital…school
halls) and remember, later, thinking momentarily to yourself, “they must feel
as messed up as I do,” and “I wish I had time to be friends with people again,”
and then let all of those thoughts (and any sense of comfort or solidarity they
might have invoked in you) fall to the wayside as you stumble into bed in
preparation for the same splendid showing of incompetence the next day.
Ah, bed! Without
fail, the first thing we think as we stumble out from under our sheets in the
atrocity of semi-darkness and winter weather is, “I can’t wait for tonight when
I can go to bed again!” It’s true; we’ve actually talked about this. And it’s
not even that life’s so unbearable (although sometimes it is); it’s simply that
bed is so thoroughly wonderful. At no other time during the day do we feel as
put together as when we climb into our beds. Here’s why: We’re physically
comfortable: we don’t have cold, shoe-pinched, tired-from-standing feet;
suffocating ties; or tucked in shirts. There’s no one watching: no attendings
or administrators arching their eyebrows in apprehension of our next moves; no
patients or students making our flaws so painfully clear to us. For a few,
life-saving hours (assuming we can turn our thoughts off long enough to fall
asleep) we are not over-thinking EVERY, SINGLE, TEENY, TINY thing we do. It is
the opposite of getting up in the morning, which we know with startling
certainty sucks horribly. We briefly regain that fool-hardy overarching
philosophy of hope that whispers in our tired brains, “tomorrow’s another day,”
and, briefly, we revel in the idea of another chance.
We spend hours, days even, planning every single detail of something that will take up about ten minutes of the next day (a presentation to the surgical team…a lesson on theme) and we still never feel prepared. And when the ten minutes is actually upon us, our well-rehearsed plans inevitably go awry, or tumble apart in one way or another. And we always come to the conclusion afterward that we were probably too prepared; that we need to be driven more by our instincts and less by our obsessiveness because we are both (we assure each other) intelligent and passionate people who are, despite all evidence to the contrary, not guaranteed failures. And then we always over-plan again for the next day. And then, when we are in a really good mood, a Friday night perhaps, we smile at each other and comfort ourselves by saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.” It feels good to accept yourself for who you are. Because, whether you’re an aspiring doctor or an aspiring teacher, you never really feel like anyone else does.
The
difference between patients and students – particularly ninth graders – is that patients want your help and students really do not. Jason should take
comfort in this knowledge, except that the difference between attendings* and
administrators is that administrators generally try to help you succeed and attendings* generally try
to help you fail. Besides, at the end of a long day, we both want to cry for
the exact same reasons: we care too much and have experienced too little; we
know we’re in the right place and it feels all wrong; we’re used to trying hard
and succeeding and now we’re trying harder than ever before and – for all we
can see – failing anyway; we keep waiting to hit rock bottom so that we have nowhere
to go but up, but somehow we just keep treading water, staying bumpily afloat
like we’re stuck in the underwater level of Super Mario Bros.
(*to be fair, the noun "attendings" here could, on any given day, be replaced by the nouns "interns" or "residents." The attending is not always the least helpful part of the day.)
(*to be fair, the noun "attendings" here could, on any given day, be replaced by the nouns "interns" or "residents." The attending is not always the least helpful part of the day.)
This is the
first time in a long time that I do not feel utterly sleep deprived (although I
usually am actually not). Yesterday was the first day that I could faintly
smell Spring in the air. It was 65 degrees today. Thursday, I did an entire ten
minutes of Pilates. Last night, though a Friday, was not a “good mood” night
and I dissolved into tears when Jason and I went out to dinner. But like any
true good cry, it left me rejuvenated. So if you think I’m dark and cynical now,
you should have heard me on Wednesday. Taking a minute to write – however depressing
the result – is proof enough that I’m doing fine. When I’m not, writing sounds
too exhausting, too time-consuming, too hopeless or useless, too unrelated to
the worries eating away at my brain to even attempt. Jason’s doing fine too, I’ll
tell you, because I’m sure you’re worried. His internal and external strength
is far greater than mine and he is more patient with the world. The suggestion
of delayed gratification does not send him into fits of panic and rage as it
does me. He enjoys a good beer, a quick workout, an occasional ball game. This
morning he let himself play an entire Halo match with Jonathan before he sent
himself off to work on the distinct ass-print he’s committed to making in the
coffee shop chair. There are good parallels, too, I’m sure, between the things
we do. We just haven’t waded through enough of the (shit or post-its) to
discover them quite yet. Except for one we know is out there, though we haven’t
experienced it yet: that moment when you KNOW, not that you’ve just tried, but
that you’ve actually succeeded at doing your job: a patient healthier, a
student smarter. Since it’s almost bedtime (yes, 7:36 on a Saturday night is
almost bedtime) I will tell you that we both have renewed hope that it will
happen someday. Because bedtime reminds us, “tomorrow’s another day.”
-R.E.A.
