A Sad Goodbye

In my last post about the school, I was very hopeful about the school year. Unfortunately, my expectations and the reality were very different, and today I had to leave my job for health reasons.

What I should have realized before accepting the job is that teaching in an institute and teaching in an elementary school are very different beasts: in an institute with adults, you can spend most of the class seated, whereas with thirty children you have to always be on your feet, demonstrating, circulating, checking. With three 90-minute classes in a day, plus recess duty and miscellaneous other fetching and running back and forth, this amounts to a lot of time standing. For an average person, this would merely be tiring, but with my history of inexplicable back problems it has proved disastrous.

As far as the job goes, I am sorry to put the school in such a difficult position, especially so soon in the school year. I feel like I have let them, and myself, down. I will miss my colleagues, especially the other teachers in my department. There are some kids that I will remember fondly, and others that I won't lose any sleep over. I feel relieved, and sad, and embarrassed, all at the same time, and more than anything I wish that things were different.