September 9th, 2015 - E.M. Gallagher

On Mondays there would be peach pie from Eli Zabar’s. Ten or eleven of us around a long conference table, posturing and gossiping over pastry and syrupy half moons of fruit. We were teaching the sons and daughters of moguls and scions and diplomats and celebrities and politicians and did you see who just walked out of their parent-teacher conference? I love that show he’s on. Yeah, he’s alright, but his daughter is a mess. I’m glad she’s not in my class.

Wednesday, September 9, 2015: The First Day of School. A few months prior I had been offered a teaching position at one of Manhattan’s most elite private schools. Their protracted / tedious / mildly insulting hiring process told me everything I needed to know about what it would be like to work there, but I pushed aside my misgivings. I ignored their lack of boundaries and ignored their blatant snobbery. Because I was trying to make My Career™ — the career that I largely disliked — work.

From almost the first moment I set foot in the classroom, in September 2003, I began planning my escape from teaching. Twelve years later, I still hadn’t escaped, so when The School deigned to interview me in May 2015, I convinced myself that this school would be different, this one I’d like. And, well, even if I didn’t looooove it, it was surely as good as it was going to get in terms of being a high school English teacher.

When I accepted their part-time offer, I didn’t have to worry about rent because my then-boyfriend and I lived in the garden apartment of his parents’ Greenpoint duplex (clearly another story for another time), and I was writing my dissertation. It felt like kismet: to have the time to finish my dissertation, to graduate from my PhD program, and to have this nice and shiny school glowing at the top of my résumé.

I never did end up putting them on my résumé.

My colleagues were a smattering of PhDs (mostly terminal ABDs) and Upper East Side lifers. People who had not / did not / could not make it in academia with a capital A. They were cold and competitive and territorial. At 34, I wasn’t green but I also wasn’t jaded. My enthusiasm at being chosen to work at what I thought to be a bastion of intellectualism was quickly buffeted by lack of invitations to join for lunch, the begrudging sharing of resources, my mentor leaving for the Back-to-School happy hour without me after expressly telling me she’d wait for me, lesson observation debriefs that felt like masterclasses in gaslighting…

Death by petty paper cuts.

We did not have cubicles so much as a 3’ x 3’ patch of Formica facing a wall that ran the length of two sides of the rectangle room. The department office windows were Manhattan windows: panes of glass that let in light but not brightness. The room was a constant state of gray.

When I was shown to my very own slab of gray, conveniently next to that of my mentor whose put-upon sighs made it clear she’d rather be snacking on glass shards than mentoring me, I promptly set about personalizing the patch of bulletin board above it, each postcard and photograph and knickknack a declaration via subtext.

A postcard from the Hamptons, as if to say I knew about rich people things (I didn’t). A bumper sticker from City Lights Books pledging my undying allegiance to the irreverence of The Beats (always and forever). A photograph from my alma mater, UC Berkeley, a reminder of my own studies (another hint at a nonconformist nature).

As I pinned bits of paper to that felt-covered cork, so precious and determined to be accepted by The Elite, I would have never believed — when I proudly posted a picture of my finished bulletin board with the hashtag #firstdayofschool to Instagram — that in March I would voluntarily walk away from that job because I refused to make myself smaller for them.

Much of my life is, happily, no longer the same. The man I lived with and thought I was going to marry would implode our relationship without warning in the middle of the living room of that garden apartment about a year later. Five years after that, after a year of trying to discuss The Handmaid’s Tale while wearing a mask and navigating teaching in a pandemic, I would finally walk away from education.

I am sad for the version of myself that believed being accepted by these miserable people who looked down their noses at everything was important — was an indicator of her own worth. But I am relieved she learned that lesson. That she / me / I have stopped concerning ourselves with The Gatekeepers. That we finally took a chance on ourselves. That we built a life around writing and storytelling and not exclusionary intellectualism. That the first day of school does not mean posturing or flexing, that it means promise and possibility.

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E.M. Gallagher is a writer, New Yorker, communications specialist, and former educator. She writes about the ghosts of her dating past, being a retired hellraiser, and rants on rapidly careening toward midlife on her Substack, “Ugh. Anyway.” She is currently working on her first book of essays.