It has been a long time since I last wrote My Year as a Teacher. Once I began working on The First Thirty Years of My Life, I felt that examining my life as a whole mattered more than continuing to reflect on that single year in the classroom. Looking at my life more broadly helped me get closer to the deepest, most fundamental causes behind my personality and everything I had gone through. That is why the series stopped.
As time passed, many specific memories of that year started to fade. In some cases, I can no longer even remember the real names behind the pseudonyms I used. But the major events of that year—and the shared pattern running through countless small, trivial incidents—are things I will never forget.
From the beginning, the point of writing My Year as a Teacher was never simply to recount what happened. I wanted to use those events as a way into deeper questions. Why has secondary vocational education deteriorated to such a troubling state? Why did so many of those students display the same destructive traits? What social realities can be uncovered beneath these surface-level incidents? And why do so many online commentators choose to ignore case after case, event after event, as if none of it exists? Those were always the real questions behind the series.
That year was painful for me, but its positive impact was even greater.
First, it forced me to see the world more truthfully. In this world, the fact that you do not see something does not mean it is not there. In fact, the things people deliberately refuse to see often reveal the world in its most real form.
Second, it pushed me into a deeper self-examination. After I left the vocational school, I suffered from depression for two years. It was only by reflecting on my own life that I began to understand why. And during that process, I realized how similar my life experience was to theirs. I saw my own shadow in those students. Without that recognition, I might never have understood the deepest reasons behind my own character and way of dealing with the world.
Third, it taught me what a teacher should be doing above all else. A teacher’s job is not only to pass on knowledge, but also to care about the healthy growth of a student’s inner life. When we encounter a troubled student, the first task should not be to condemn them for having problems. We should dig into what lies behind those problems, because only then is there any real chance of resolving them.
If every teacher could truly do that, the student suicide rate would fall to zero. But is that even possible? Most teachers today come from middle-class backgrounds. What they have never seen, they often assume does not exist. And when uncomfortable facts are spoken aloud, they respond by denying them again and again, or simply dismissing them as fabricated stories.
Fourth, collective interests cannot be used as an excuse to neglect the development of the individual. Every person lives an independent life of their own; within their family, each one of them is a mountain holding up an entire world. If the development of even one student goes wrong, the distortion it creates in society is not small. As long as basic principles are protected, it is worth sacrificing some collective honor if that is what it takes to ensure that each individual gets the growth and progress they deserve.
One line from The Gulag Archipelago left a lasting mark on me:
Policies that erase the individual in the name of the collective, both inside and outside the Gulag Archipelago, slowly drain away what little humanity remains in people’s hearts.
I have decided to continue writing My Year as a Teacher.
But I no longer have the energy or the capacity to recount every scattered detail from that year one by one. So I am changing the approach. I will begin with the harsh social truths I mentioned above, and from there move into the major events that took place during that year. Through that line of thinking, it will become possible to understand why all of it happened.
And perhaps then it will also become clear why that year has remained a psychological shadow I will carry for the rest of my life.