There’s a lot about teaching itself that was terrible and painful. There were parts of it that were satisfying and uplifting. A lot of folks who did TFA would likely say something similar; a lot of them might say something different.

It’s back-to-school season, and for the first time, I am not a part of the melee. At 24 years old, I have no classes to prepare for, no lead pencils to buy. My masters degree is completed, a useless (and enormous) piece of cardstock in a very expensive frame. College is a distant utopian dream. My two years as an inner-city middle-school teacher have been distilled to a line on a resume, a punch line to the black joke that was my early twenties. That thing I did, that one time.