I find it difficult to write the classic teacher piece—the kind where the teacher emerges morally intact, inspirational, and somehow untouched by the work. Those essays read like performances to me, and in my New York-abrasive way of seeing things, I distrust performance. I always have. That may come from my own history: I was a special education student once, placed just outside the body politic of the school, visible in ways I didn’t choose. Neurofibromatosis Type 1 will do that—visible tumors have a way of deciding how people see you before you speak.
Still, this is where I ended up. Teaching special education in an urban public school.
I won’t pretend the job is easy, or that my school resembles anyone’s idea of a wholesome high school experience. Students enter through metal detectors. Their bags go onto conveyor belts to be scanned. Despite this, things still get in. Vapes. Knives. We’ve had a gun recovered on school grounds. That’s not a headline to me. That’s environment. After enough years, you learn how to keep your face neutral, how to smile when appropriate, how to place the wall where it needs to go.
I am calm in situations that would undo a lot of people. I say that plainly because it’s true. Calm is required. Panic is contagious.
That doesn’t mean I’m not afraid.
When a situation starts to turn, my attention narrows. I watch hands. I register where I am in the room. I lower my voice because volume accelerates things. I note exits without looking like I’m noting exits. I do not think about what happens if I misread the moment, because thinking about it would slow me down. Fear is present, but it isn’t useful. What keeps you standing is attention—precise, disciplined, unsentimental.
I understand why Ernst Jünger wrote the way he did. Survival requires that kind of focus. You don’t reflect while the shelling is happening. You deal with what’s in front of you.
One of my students—I’ll call her Mary—has an emotional disability. She is not allowed near scissors. Any scissors. Her pattern is consistent. She perceives a look, assigns intent, escalates. A glance becomes a threat. A threat becomes a fight.
I learned the signs early: the shift in posture, the narrowing focus, the moment before the choice is made.
“Mary,” I’ll say, “let’s get something to eat.” Or—”What did you do over the weekend?”
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
When it does, the success looks insignificant from the outside. Later, she’ll tell me, “I know I should have thought before I acted.”
That’s an improvement.
This is not the kind of moment that makes it into teacher movies. There’s no swelling music, no transformation arc. Stories about education prefer redemption narratives—Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds, Stand and Deliver—stories that gloss over the grind and compress progress into something uplifting and safe. I understand why those stories exist. I also know what they leave out.
Progress here is incremental. It’s procedural. It’s often invisible.
What scares me isn’t that I stay calm when a student almost fights another student, or when a parent is yelling at me from three feet away. Calm is functional. Calm is necessary.
What scares me is how quickly I can return to normal afterward.
I can de‑escalate a situation, move a body out of a hallway, lower my voice until the temperature drops—and then sit down and eat my lunch like nothing unusual has happened. I don’t shake. I don’t replay it immediately. My appetite is still there.
I don’t know when that started. I only know that it feels earned—and wrong—at the same time.
Afterward, when the building settles and the day moves on, I feel closer to Paul Bäumer than I’d like to admit. The calm doesn’t feel heroic. It feels estranging. Like I’ve crossed some distance that doesn’t fully close again. You survive the moment, but something stays behind, unnamed.
This is the part I don’t talk about much. Not because it’s secret, but because most people don’t want the details. The violence makes them uncomfortable. The calm afterward makes them uneasy. They want stories that resolve. This work doesn’t resolve. It continues.
The next day comes anyway. I return. I teach. I stay calm again.
I’m not writing this to position myself as exceptional. I’m writing because there are teachers who don’t recognize themselves in the polished narratives—teachers who measure their days by small, hard‑won moments that don’t look like much unless you’ve lived inside them.
If you are one of them, I see you.
You are not doing nothing.
You are still standing.
T. S. Carney (he/him) is a special education teacher who navigates the “infected zone” of faculty rooms and industrial bureaucracy with equal parts caffeine and cynicism. His work will appear in Maudlin House (2/11/26, 10/05/26), Eunoia Review (March 2026), Neon Origami, and has appeared in Your Impossible Voice with upcoming stories in Soul Poetry, Prose, and Arts (May 15, 2026, Summer 2026) The Educator’s Workroom, and The Good Men Project, and the Gotham Guillotine (July 2026), tongue etc (July 2026), Discretionary Love (June 2026), FLARE Magazine (June 2026), and Once Upon a Crocodile (December 2027).