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You have hope for the future, that’s why you’re there at your job.

You teach the way you were taught and also the way you weren’t. You want something better for younger people. You want them to have a better life and a better education than you had. You’d like to work at a place that is creative, nurturing, and supportive to teachers.

It all trickles down to the students. They are the public. They are the future. You are providing a service.

You want peace. You want students to have lives somewhere between “Downton Abbey” and Hobbit Land. You want them to have a great standard of living, or at the very least to be able to choose to have one. You want them to have long, healthy, happy lives. You want to see principals and teachers drinking coffee together, joking together, problem-solving together. (Wait, is this a charter school?)

You work at a school that has solar panels on every rooftop. There is a school garden that provides all the lunch salad. There is plenty to eat and the kids can’t get enough of the great cafeteria food. There are weekly Hawaiian cultural events and many speakers visit the campus just to soak in the ambiance of the place. (Is this Kamehameha Schools campus?)

You see a lot during the school day. You hear combinations of put-downs and swear words that you never even imagined. Teenagers change moods five times within the hour. They have many, many unmet needs beyond what you have an inkling of. They need to eat breakfast and lunch. They do not. It is nearly impossible for some of them to sit still. Forget focusing on assignments with bodies going full throttle on empty. Many are going to be parents. They have trouble writing complete sentences or even writing at all. They’ve never checked out a book from a library. A wide array of social services should have an annex on campus that students and their parents can access.

You know that your school is not unusual when there are at least 10 teachers that were here last year that aren’t anymore, and new faces in their rooms this year. Many are substitute teachers. Their faces are therefore familiar.

You were once a sub. You remember trying to ask the students for spare change so you could eat lunch at Kalaheo High School. Yes, the sub with the moped. The moped did not have a regular seat, but a towel instead. The students said, “That is one mean ride, Miss.” They were quite amused. You were just glad you didn’t have to walk.

Then, you got your teaching certificate going to evening classes via The Bus over the Pali at UH-Manoa. You starved.

This is why teachers leave the profession in Hawaii before even really getting started. After jumping through the probationary hoops and securing tenure, new teachers begin to add up their bills and review their pay stubs. When it is obvious that it will take years to get a raise or jump up a pay step, many see that it is not worth the effort to bow and scrape in the throes of poverty while working so hard just to keep up with mandated paperwork and data collection and submission.

If you have a student loan hanging over your head, it may seem like an endless battle to even put a dent in your debt.

You talked to a brand new teacher. She said that she noticed the students talking back more this semester. She comes across as a level-headed tough sort of person. You wonder how long she will last in a system hell-bent on getting rid of its best and brightest.

In the long run, they are just too expensive. Teachers are being riffed/laid-off and then being forced to re-apply for their jobs if they want to keep them. They won’t. It’s a way to get rid of expensive teachers.

You have become one of those teachers. Your days are numbered.

It seems as if the system is just out to make it very difficult for classroom teachers to find reasons to remain in the profession. Yet that is saying the system has logic, an impetus for responsibility, for compassion.

It’s like putting all your eggs in one basket, a very standard one. This means it is arbitrary, capricious, and discriminatory. Easily manipulated, like the Common Core Standards.

Susan Kay Anderson teaches English at Pahoa High School and Hawaii Community College on the Big Island. She has taught in island schools for nearly two decades.