There’s a verse in the Bible I’ve been thinking about lately. “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”
While I believe in God (kind of) and like money as much as the next gal, I don’t consider either of these entities my master. Instead, I replace them in my head with “You cannot serve both comedy and teaching.”
---
I teach at a school in Milwaukee, a school where the kids are far behind grade level, where I struggle to maintain control of the classroom everytime I have 6th grade, where I could put in 70 hours a week and still feel like I was failing. The kids don’t like me (at least the 6th graders don’t - there is an 8th grader named Zion who wore a “I Love Hot Moms” sweatshirt the other day and winked at me). It’s been difficult to pinpoint exactly why I dislike the school so much, why I feel like it’s working against me instead of with me. Part of it is that some of my lessons are already planned. A lot of the day is intervention, so the admin wants to make sure that the students still receive some grade-level instruction, and that’s where these pre-made lessons come in. Anyway, the other day I pulled up the PowerPoint for my 7th grade English class, and the warm-up was to watch a YouTube video and use context clues to figure out who the murderer was. As we all watched the video, my heart lurched - there was Garrick.
I’ve known Garrick Bernard probably since I started comedy. We aren’t close friends, but we’re friendly. We’ve carpooled to shows a couple times, and I like talking to him. One time we did a show in Orange County, and on the way we talked about the election, and Bernie, and podcasts. Alas, we are Millennials. It was September or October 2019, and for the past couple months, I had been trying to get pregnant. That day with Garrick, though, was when my period was supposed to start if I wasn’t pregnant, and I felt cramps, and I told Garrick that I was disappointed I wasn’t pregnant. After the show, an older man in the audience offered all the comics some homemade moonshine, and I shrugged and drank some down, resigned to my still-empty uterus. On that drive back to LA, Garrick told me that he heard Adam Eget at the Comedy Store was the one booking stand-ups on David Spade’s show, and I felt a jittery sense of hope, that maybe my dreams were within reach after all.
The next time I saw Garrick was after I’d done the set on TV, after I found out that I was indeed pregnant, and you can have cramps that feel like period cramps when they’re actually pregnancy cramps, after I lamented to my husband that I poisoned our baby with a strange man’s moonshine. Garrick and I were on Sunset Boulevard, walking opposite ways, crossing paths. I think we hugged. I think after we parted, I vomited up tomato basil soup.
The car ride to Orange County, the moment outside the Store, a pandemic, and then he’s on the screen in my classroom in Milwaukee.
“I know that guy,” I can’t help but tell my students.
“The Black dude?” they say.
“Yeah. I met him in LA.”
They take this in. They don’t ask how or why I know him. Like I said, the kids don’t love me. They don’t really care that I know a guy in a well-made YouTube video. They aren’t interested in my backstory.
---
A few years ago, I was fired from a school for rich kids. The tuition was 60k, which was 15 thousand more than my salary. It was a school for kids with learning differences, but it was also a school for kids whose parents were celebrities, kids who had multiple nannies, kids who’d been to France twelve times before their twelfth birthday. They lived in mansions in Beverly Hills, and their uncles were JJ Abrams, and I lived an hour away from school, on the Eastside, with my husband and four roommates.
I never resented the kids for being rich. It wasn’t their fault, and on the whole, they were still normal, sweet, funny kids. Mostly, I hated a couple of their parents, and I really hated the administration, who always put the parents’ desires over the kids’ best interests. The admin sided with the money, and the parents were the ones with the money. This was always true, but when I got fired, it was undeniable.
A mildly famous actor dad at the school saw my stand-up online, got offended, and emailed the principal. I was sent home, my computer was remotely turned off, they used a courier service to deliver me termination papers, and I was told I couldn’t return to the school during school hours as if I were a fucking pedophile.
The school sided with the dad because that’s where the money was. It’s not that the school suddenly found out I did stand-up; they’d known the whole time. Hell, the principal once came to see me at a bar show in Hollywood. They had me do stand-up at the staff Christmas party one year. Comedy wasn’t the problem; it was a rich man’s opinion of my comedy. The wealth is what made teaching and comedy incompatible.
---
The school I’m at now is perhaps the antithesis. The kids qualify for free lunch. They perform below average on state testing. Lots of my kids have learning differences, but most of them are not diagnosed. They don’t have speech and language therapists, or reading specialists, or counselors. Their parents are working-class. Their parents don’t send me weekly emails.
The school is massively under-resourced. Before school started, the P.E. teacher quit. Five weeks passed, still no P.E. teacher. Then they hired one, but he stopped showing up, so he got fired. They hired another one, but on his third day at school, some of the 8th grade girls charged at him, and he said, “I’m over this shit,” and left. So we’re back to no P.E. teacher.
At this school, no one knows I do comedy. Last week, I told the 7th grade homeroom teacher that a couple of her 7th graders have been leaving me post-its in their desks that say, “Ms. M is an ugly bitch.” I’m sure that this isn’t the first time I’ve been called a bitch by one of my students, but it is the first time I’ve been able to verify that it was said. I didn’t tell the other teacher so that she’d pity me or defend me, but mostly just that she’d commiserate. Instead, she talked to the girls. She asked why they wrote that, and she reported back to me. “They don’t think you’re very personable,” she said. “They want you to be funnier. And I told them, you want her to be funnier? She’s not a comedian!”
It felt like a line in a movie.
Here, at this school, I still cannot serve both teaching and comedy, but the reason still isn’t comedy. At that school on the westside of LA, the problem was wealth; here it is the absence of wealth. It is no P.E. teacher, which means no prep time. It is trying to engage 25 sixth graders, 18 of whom cannot independently construct a paragraph. It is no teaching assistant, no school counselor, no art class, no music class. It is half the teachers leaving last year. It is being asked to get all these kids on track, it’s ignoring all the other variables that are working against them, the variables that got them to this point. “It’s like they’re telling you to fix climate change,” my husband says. “But no single person can do that.”
---
Yesterday I quit my job.
I like teaching, and if I’m going to do something to make money besides writing and comedy, I am happy to teach. But I do not want to teach if teaching demands all of me; teaching cannot be my only master.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I'm in the fourth year of working at a Title-1 school in Florida. Prior to Covid, my students' learning gap was a crisis on its own. Post-Covid it became a new kind of emergency, one that will not be remedied anytime soon. I enjoy the work that I do, because I'm making a difference. I have built relationships with my students and seen changes in their behavior/academics, but it's glacial.
I'm exhausted.
I look at my colleagues--the elite teachers--who live, breathe, eat, teaching. The ones that teach entire generations before retiring with a comfy pension. I'm not them.
As someone who moonlights as a standup comedian, I appreciate your courage to quit teaching. You're a funny comic. If you're ever in the St. Pete-area, would love to give you stage time.
Your insight is so honest and valuable. You deserve to be happy :)