After 9 years, I finally hit the 15GB limit on gmail, so I'm deleting old emails. And I found myself in 2012, emails from my first-year disaster with @TeachForAmerica (which NO ONE should do, by the way). I have so many terrible, shameful repressed memories from that time. 1/

I don't really talk about that time in my life because it is literally painful to talk about @TeachForAmerica and hard to do so without crying. But suffice to say I was nowhere near ready to teach 5 grade levels of special ed in a charter school with no mentors, then to... 2/

...be gaslit into believing that, because I was not willing to give all my life (I was giving everything) to work thru an untenable & (I found out later) ILLEGAL special ed conditions, that I was the bad teacher. @TeachForAmerica said I didn't do enough and kicked me out. 3/

And I almost left teaching.

To think, I have wanted to be a teacher since I was six. I was going to be an elementary ed teacher before the 2008 crisis left a hiring freeze in NYC, leaving me to resort to @teachforamerica for a special ed job.

That is so hard to go back to. 4/

Ugh, I'm getting teary-eyed as I write this.

So much shame in losing my first teaching job, after trying everything, feeling for years after that I just wasn't enough for my students, that I should have just toughed it through with grit and "leaned in."

That's all crap. 5/

Teachers deal with an endless pile of crap, and then are made to feel bad for things that are not in our control, and put into untenable positions all the time. And because people know teachers care too much, they know we'll do what's right, thus placing huge burdens on us. 6/

I was forced to confront that teacher working conditions are our students' learning conditions. That charter school, which hired majority @TeachForAmerica/Teaching Fellows teachers, had ridiculously high teacher turnover rates, was Bronzeville Lighthouse and now closed. 7/

I'm glad I learned so early in my teaching career that my working conditions matter, that my students' learning conditions matter, that community matters, that unions matter, that public education matters.

that I matter as a teacher.

And that I still had it in me to teach. 8/

@TeachForAmerica almost broke me.

I am so happy I #ResistTFA and that I am still a teacher today.

I was SO close to quitting teaching.

I was SO close to letting people who aren't teaching tell me I shouldn't be teaching.

That is the most heartbreaking thing of all. 9/9

P.S. I didn't delete the @TeachForAmerica emails because I knew one day I would be emotionally ready to write about my time in TFA and #ResistTFA after that. Hoping that's this summer.

P.P.S. I got my Google account down 2 GB! So I have still enough room for emails and the like!