Hello Invisible Audience,
On Friday, December 13, I taught my last Spanish class.
I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that it will be the last one I ever teach, but it seems rather likely that’s the case at this point. And I’ve had a hard time sitting down to tell you about it.
I always knew that owning my own business teaching Spanish classes was not something I’d do forever. Part of that is just self-awareness—I’ve held a lot of jobs in my life, and lived a lot of places. It seemed likely I would either change professions or move again, or both. I also knew it wasn’t a recession-proof business model, and while I was proud of myself for being able to know that, I have to admit: it didn’t help when things started to go downhill.
I don’t think there’s a single reason that things stopped working. I think it’s likely some of the reasons were not something I could control, and some of them were. Although inflation is cooling, it does not change the fact that costs are much higher than they were several years ago. I had to raise my prices like everyone else. I also had a very long, significant health scare that ate up most of my savings, which left me less I could fall back on when enrollment dropped. At one point, I was teaching 80 kids a week. This fall, I was teaching 35. That’s a significant difference, but I couldn’t bring myself to hustle at finding more ways to increase revenue within the Spanish class sphere. And that, ultimately, is what really brought about the end: the realization that I was relieved there were less kids to teach, even as I started to panic about how I would make ends meet.
I’ve quit things before, Invisible Audience. Jobs, sure, but also businesses. I stopped selling the cookbooks I’d compiled and moved toPanama. It was one of the most painful and necessary things I’d done up to that point. And I feel like I’m standing in another similar place: as much as I enjoyed teaching local kids Spanish for a lot of years, at some point I had to admit it was not working anymore and move on.
I recently ran into someone I know who used to be a farmer. Now she’s a biologist, and her kids were some of the first ones I taught. When we talked about me closing my business, I told her that I knew she understood, because she and her husband had had to make a similar decision when they stopped farming. “We probably should have stopped sooner,” she said.
I’ve thought about that a lot, because it’s a summary of what happened. It barely touches the surface on what a decision like that can entail. I have no idea what it looked like inside their decision, but I do know a lot of what it looks like inside of mine.
The first time I admitted out loud to a group of people that I knew I needed to stop teaching and it made me sad, I cried.
On one of my last days of class, when I was getting over a cold and had half lost my voice and a kid wasn’t listening to me, I was grateful it was going to be over.
When one kid leaned against my leg while we waited for the rest of the students in another class on a bus that was late, I felt my heart tear a little bit.
When another kid needed helping blowing their nose for the umpteenth time in an hour, I swore I’d never teach kids again.
When several kids handed over thank you cards, I wanted to weep.
When I’ve thought about telling you about my decision to stop, Invisible Audience, all I’ve felt is numb.
It’s so hard to encompass into a sentence: the summer camps in a fellowship hall without air conditioning; the countless times the kids have made me laugh, or cry. The things those kids have taught me, even when I didn’t appreciate the lesson. The ones who came in eager to please and the ones who came in with their own ideas about what class should look like. The things I did over the years to try and make the business more sustainable that just didn’t work out long-term, and the things that were more popular than expected.
I fell into teaching Spanish in Leavenworth not long after I moved here, after someone posted in a local Facebook group asking if anyone locally taught Spanish. When I put on the flyer for adult Spanish classes that I used to teach kids to ski, someone asked, “Do you teach kids Spanish?” and I thought, “I used to teach small children to slide around on slippery sticks stuck to their feet. How hard could teaching Spanish be?”
Foolish me.
Watching these kids has been a great gift that has nothing to do with the language. Telling me in no uncertain terms what they like and don’t like. Naming four unrelated emotions when I ask them how they feel (sad, mad, happy, excited). Breaking my heart into tiny pieces by crawling onto my lap when I read a book, or saying that their favorite part of class was getting to be with me.
I am happy I made this decision, Invisible Audience. I am also sad. I’m mad it felt like it was thrust upon me in a lot of ways, but I’m also excited about the new possibilities I’m exploring. Those will likely entail pivoting to a completely different career path—I’m currently applying to graduate programs for mental health counseling—and may involve moving. But none of them involve completely forgetting all those kiddos whose tiny hands left sticky marks all over my heart.
Love and excited, sad kisses,
Morgan
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