Gratitude Friday from a Middle School English Language Arts Teacher

This video captures me at my most exuberant.

Commuting, Teaching, and the Strange Existential Quiet of 7:00 A.M.

Since September, my day has begun at 5:00 a.m. in Queens. By 6:00, I’m on the E train heading for Washington Heights — an hour and twenty-five minutes of subterranean meditation before first bell. I transfer at Port Authority, usually early enough to glimpse the city before it fully wakes. By the time the A pulls into 168th Street, the sky is pulling its first threads of light across the station roof.

I walk past the old Croton Aqueduct tower; a reminder of a New York that once survived on a narrow ribbon of water; and up toward my school. But most mornings, I barely register the history around me. I’m thinking about lesson plans, attendance sheets, and the unpredictable weather systems known as seventh graders.

Teaching has its rituals: unlocking the classroom before anyone arrives, flipping on the lights, setting the day in motion before the din begins. By 7:55, the “buffalo” arrive — loud, hilarious, tender, exhausting. On good days, I can match their energy. On others, I’m simply the adult keeping the world stitched together.

This year, the work has felt especially existential — not in the dramatic, philosophical sense, but in the way teaching forces you to be utterly present. A sixth grader whispers she’s bleeding and needs the bathroom. A student confides heartbreak. Someone forgot breakfast. Another kid, sensing I am taking care of someone else, decides to pick up a chair in a show of strength. "Make good choices," I say, partly to them, partly to myself. Someone else forgot how to be twelve. You meet all of it with whatever grace you can muster.

Lately, though, I’ve felt something quieter: a strange numbness, the kind that slips in when the body is tired and the mind has carried too much. No one tells you in teacher school that caring deeply has a metabolic cost.