I could feel the chair breaking underneath me. It was snapping at the base, separating the seat from the swivel as I reached around for anything to keep me from falling. At least one of the muscles in my abdomen started twisting with my awkward and contorting figure, reminding me that work was no substitute for exercise. And yet fall I did, along with the pens, the bins, and the papers I grabbed on the way down. But there was no time to be stunned, no time to deal with the chair or the mess, or the pain in my body. I was on a conference call with a parent, someone I’d been hoping to chat with for several weeks. So I sat there on the ground in my classroom, phone in hand, listening and talking as if nothing had happened, as if everything was normal.

With most parents, it would have been easy to stop the conversation and apologize for the inconvenience. They might have asked if I was okay, I might have asked to call them back, and we both might have shared a good laugh. And to be honest, I could have said something to this particular parent. He also would have cared. And he would have waited for a callback, laughing with me on the other side of it. But I wanted this call to be perfect. I needed this call to be perfect. He was my old boss, from the days before I got into education.

Looking back almost twelve years, back to early November 2010, so much had changed. Back then, he was the general manager of a restaurant in South Florida where I trained all of his servers. Back then, he knew how much I wanted to become a teacher. He knew how hard I was trying. I had worked for his store since it opened in 2005, through college, through the recession and a year of substitute teaching, through two years of countless applications and interviews. No matter how many times I showed up, school after school, no matter much I tried to make myself sound qualified, no principal had ever reached out to offer me a job. The prospect of continuing my search felt useless. At the time, I was willing to keep working in hospitality if need be, but the restaurant was supposed to be a stopgap on my way to the classroom. And a part of me was coming to terms with the possibility of a future more like his, a future managing restaurants, working weekends and holidays, making people smile and laugh on their days off. It certainly wasn’t a far cry from the life I was already living, maybe just a few more steps up and I’d be in his shoes.

When my phone rang in early November, with that long-awaited invitation to start teaching fourth grade and begin my career, he seemed to already be expecting my resignation. His wife was a teacher and we had talked, many times, about that life, her life, the one I wanted. So with a firm and memorable handshake, he let me go and we both moved forward, independent of each other.

For three years, from 2010 to 2013, I continued to teach fourth grade at a Title I school in Palm Beach County, periodically stopping in and saying hello to the servers I had trained at the restaurant, some of them now friends, checking in with my old boss, letting him know how the new job was going. But over time, South Florida became less and less like home. My wife, Melissa, had family in Orlando, so we moved about three hours north. I landed a rare job teaching middle school web design at another Title I school in Seminole County, a position I not only held for six years, but one that I loved, right up until the end, despite my program being carved up and axed. By 2019, after nine years in the classroom, I took a leap of faith, returning to teach elementary at a charter school in the same county, nearly two hundred miles from where I started my career. And yet, just a few weeks before COVID crippled the world in early 2020, I stepped through the courtyard of my new school and saw him pacing, on his phone, in a crowd of other parents, like we were back at the restaurant, both of us busy and working.

I knew he had also moved his family to Central Florida, just like my wife and I, but the chances that he would be in my school, on that day, with a child just a few years away from being in my classroom, the whole thing felt surreal and unbelievable. For the first time, I felt a knot, a sense of personal and professional duty, to stay in fifth grade, to continue doing what I was doing, to get better each year until his daughter reached my classroom, like a full-circle act of service, a return on his investment and patience all those years before. With 4,000 schools in the State of Florida and nearly three million students, it was hard to imagine passing up the opportunity, even as the pandemic raged, even as my principal offered me other positions. I didn’t budge. I was there, committed, even if my chair eventually broke in the middle of a conference.

At the start of my career, there was a small voice in the back of my head arguing that no parent would ever care what I had to say if they found out that I wasn’t a father. I worried that moms and dads would prod too far, that they would ask me why, that I would feel obligated to share too much too soon. But that uneasy, self-conscious apprehension went away quickly as I conceded that no parent conference, not one, was ever about me or my personal life. These meetings were always about seeking a solution or sharing the success of their child, not mine. I grew to appreciate and admire the teachers who did go home to children, who did come into a parent meeting with a sense of shared empathy and experience. But I also learned to accept, like every other teacher, that it wasn’t necessary for me to have my own child in order to demonstrate that I was fully invested in the care and progress of someone else’s child.

During those first three years in education, I worked with several hundred fourth and fifth graders, some in the classroom and others through various events and field trips, enough kids that I was rarely in a parent meeting alone. Two of those years I spent giving lessons in math and science through a dual language program, departmentalized, with students learning their subjects in English for half the day, Spanish for the rest, which meant that a parent conference might include up to four teachers, all of us working with the same child. As a novice in the profession, I often took a backseat in those conversations. It wasn’t that I never spoke, but that I didn’t need to speak as often. I simply came prepared, waited my turn, and listened.

I saw frustrated parents crying, telling us they were overwhelmed. I saw veteran teachers, leaning in with hugs and tissues. I learned that whatever issues or concerns I had with a child on my end, it was more important to hear the issues and concerns on their end. I watched my colleagues—far more experienced—take time to measure their words without attack or blame. Even when a parent entered a meeting with aggression, I was a witness as they brought down the temperature. In time, I learned to lead similar conversations, avoiding jabs and searching for common ground.

But we weren’t always perfect. I still remember a parent storming out of a room, dragging her daughter out like a rag doll. Neither the mom nor my colleague were able to keep the discussion calm even as the yelling passed down multiple hallways. Truancy may have been the issue, but it’s hard to remember faces and names, let alone the causes of every concern from that far back.

What I do remember, and often regret, was the time I let a parent down by making a far bigger deal of something than there ever needed to be. During one of my days off, I left a test with our substitute, a test that I wanted the kids to take in my absence. But when I graded them the next day, I noticed that several of my students had the same wrong answers on the same questions. It was clearly cheating, yes, but the way I managed the situation, you would have thought these were the Nuremberg Trials. I made about a dozen phone calls, spoke to witnesses, made sure everyone knew it was a big deal, that someone would have to pay for messing up like this. What it should have been was an opportunity to coach the kids on the subject of honesty, then learn, as a teacher, to always be present for tests. Instead, what I managed to do was upset multiple families and children with a federal case. I’d clearly forgotten that they were only nine years old, and that it was my job to help them succeed, rather than burning and burying them in guilt.

One of the parents in the “cheating scandal” was a peer, a fellow teacher who worked down the hall. At the start of that year, she told me how thankful she was that her daughter would get to have a male teacher, considering how disproportionate the gender roles tended to be in most elementary schools. But in the days and weeks that followed that incident, I could see in her eyes that I was a disappointment, that most of her hope for me was gone. I don’t think she saw me as a bad teacher, exactly, but I definitely wasn’t winning any awards or accolades from her end of the hall. And what it taught me, in retrospect, was to treat every child as if their mom or dad were in the next room over, as if every parent were a colleague, a friend, or a family member. Again, those were my first two or three years, filled with mistakes.

After those early days of teaching, I grew less rigid in my approach to classroom management, more forgiving and flexible when the situation warranted patience, but I wasn’t immune from dropping the ball in a parent meeting. For example, I’ll never forget arriving late to a middle school conference with six other teachers and another parent-peer (someone who worked at the other end of the same campus with a son in my web design class). She stared at me with daggers when I found my seat, mostly because I crossed my arms with a coffee and slouched, like I didn’t want to be there. The truth was that I had stayed up late tweaking a lesson and my eyes were bloodshot, and because these were all peers, I thought I could get away with being a little less serious. That was a mistake on my part, especially when it must have looked like I was suffering from a hangover. She came to me later in the day, on her own, across campus, and chewed me out so fiercely, so aggressively that I had no choice but to apologize for the mere appearance of not caring. Because of course I cared. Of course it mattered to me that her child was struggling, not just in my class but in other classes. Unfortunately, that impression was hard to shake, since I was one of the reasons she asked to meet.

After my apology, after the candor of our conversation grew less hostile, she told me that her son was afraid to ask me for help, that he had tried to ask questions in the past and that I had shut him down. So I invited her to sit in on my class at any point down the road to observe. I explained that my classroom and my approach were both built around discussions. I told her that questions were always welcome in my classroom, but that once a set of instructions had been given twice, once we had exhausted any remaining questions about how to get started or what to do next, I would set my students loose on a task that had all the instructions repeated in writing. I wanted them to be self-sufficient and self-empowered. So I made it my job to circulate through the room and listen for the better and more relevant questions, things like, “I’m on step three, but I’m not sure how to pronounce this word.” If a child simply raised their hand to say “I don’t get it” or ask “what are we doing,” I would encourage them to reach out to a neighbor or a seat partner, someone who could repeat the basics that we had just gone over. And as I spoke to this mother about my teaching style, I didn’t apologize for the method, but I did apologize for the possibility that it ever made her child feel unable to ask me questions. We ended with a standing invitation, again, for her to visit my classroom at any point in the future. But she never came by.

I spent the rest of that semester looking for ways to offer her son more positive feedback, praising him at every small and modest turn of success. I don’t know that she ever knew this or saw this, but it was a conscious effort on my part to change. Even if she continued to judge me poorly, even if she continued to feel negative about my abilities as a teacher, I took her words at face value and tried to be better, answering more of his questions myself, with less redirection. Because disregarding her concerns as a mother would have been an act far worse than showing up late to a meeting and slouching. In the aftermath of our uncomfortable exchange, as a result of my shift on her behalf, I became a better teacher to the rest of my students as well, loosening up, less resistant to answer questions a third or fourth time if need be.

The hardest part about hearing something negative from a parent, even if it’s necessary, is that I hold onto the information and absorb it. I start to second guess myself. I start to replay conversations and wonder if maybe I’m not that good at the job. But I’m also not alone. Many of my peers have lost sleep, multiple nights, because they got a frustrated email from a parent, late at night or first thing in the morning. It’s one thing to believe we’ve established rapport with our students. It’s quite another to learn that the parent of a child doesn’t think we have. It’s even worse if we already think low of our abilities, of ourselves, and then that email shows up. We get overly self-conscious, we lose our sense of rhythm, maybe get defensive. Other times, we fight through the hurt and get better, because we don’t want to fail any parent in the same way again.

This thing we have with parents is not a fight over who matters more to a child. We’re not opposites and we’re not enemies. On the contrary, we serve the same children from different ends of the daily hourglass, each of us desperately hoping that they’ll succeed in whatever it is they set their minds to achieve, each of us giving them the tools to be better than us. But because we love and care for these children, together, our occasional conflicts are not all that unlike a husband and wife deciding how to manage a house, or a brother and a sister deciding how to care for their aging parents, or two young friends deciding what to do with the $10 bill they just found in a book. It’s a partnership, this thing we have. But it’s also a fragile partnership, easily rattled by the things we allow ourselves to believe about each other.

On my end, as a Florida teacher, I believe this already fragile partnership was put under tremendous strain at the start of the COVID pandemic, by factors beyond our control. In the beginning, when we were allowed to see inside of each other’s homes, when teachers were still trying to teach through a camera and parents could sit next to their child during a lesson, it opened a peculiar window that most of us had never experienced. For some, it was a source of shared empathy, teachers being more patient with their students, more cognizant that their voices could be heard by multiple people across multiple houses. Likewise, many parents, still trying to work and maintain their jobs from home, were often quick to share their appreciation with teachers who kept trying to teach through a camera, successful or not. I’ll never forget waving to a parent from the door of my house after she dropped off a fresh cup of coffee and a bag of muffins, a gesture that symbolized our common effort to break through the isolation, a reminder that we were in this thing together, that we would figure it out.

But as the weeks turned into months, as we started a new school year, all of us frustrated, all of us still trying to break through the isolation, our partnership was put under a different kind of strain, also beyond our control. Without a voice of our own in Tallahassee, we were told that our views were binary, that we often had to choose between elected officials and health officials, politicians and school boards, good guys and bad guys. And even then, as health officials were silenced, as school boards were bullied, our choices grew more narrow. You were either with the state or against it, all or nothing. That consolidation of political power in Florida made our fights a little different than the ones people were having in other states. Everyone around the world and around the nation was debating if and when to open schools, if and how often to get vaccinated, if and whether to wear masks. But in Florida, the governor and his party took a unique stance, actively telling parents that they should stand up to districts and schools and teachers, that they should view us as a potential threat to their children if any of us should express disagreement with the state.

Deep within this pool of contention, most of us were just barely treading water, trying not to drown. Parents were eager to find normalcy again, to get back to work if possible, and move past the pandemic. Teachers were as well, but as the climate of education grew more tense, many of my colleagues turned somber. Once cheerful and optimistic, some of them left the profession entirely. Others continued showing up, present in body but not always in spirit, their joy sapped by impossible hurdles and unreasonable expectations. But instead of lowering the water levels and helping to put us back on familiar ground, together, the voices in Tallahassee grew louder and more aggressive. Again, parents were told that we were a danger, that teachers were loose cannons, that our textbooks were a source of liberal indoctrination, that too many of us were teaching racial hatred over racial harmony and sexuality over basic math. On their own, these accusations were almost enough to choke our profession of its most creative, effective educators. But that’s when the state began writing and passing laws meant to enshrine and formalize their accusations, making sure we knew that parents could now sue us, our schools, and our districts, if we ever dared to say the wrong thing, whether by accident or intention.

At the start of 2022, I couldn’t help but feel a strange, defensive nostalgia. As I watched those laws moving through the state, from simple committees to the desk of the governor, I couldn’t help but think about all the parents who had entrusted me and my colleagues with their children over many years, how easy it was for laws like this to make it seem as though their trust was somehow misplaced. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was possible to restore what was breaking or broken, to give parents and families a small sense of what it’s been like, what it feels like, to be a Florida teacher right now. Without the microphones of Tallahassee or the pen of a politician, I decided to lend a voice to the conversation, however small or seemingly irrelevant.

These essays are both a reflection of my experience as an educator and a reaction to the rising tone of animosity that swirls above and toward this profession. Sometimes they were written and shared with friends. Other times I kept them to myself, wondering if they would ever have an audience. In a field of work where I’ve seen far more goodwill than resentment, this air of bad blood seems misaligned and off balance. That doesn’t mean I believe that every parent needs to favor every teacher, or that every teacher needs to get along with every parent. But rather, that the vast majority of us, on both sides, have gotten along quite well for many years. In writing and sharing these pages, I’m appealing to men and women, moms and dads, colleagues and legislators at every level, to remember that we are on the same side in the same endeavor. At the very least, we have been and ought to be. All of us have laughed together, told stories together, cried and hoped, together. So I chose to follow every essay with a break, a reflection of the warmth, the love, the humor, and the heartbreak that makes us all human.

I don’t pretend to be a voice for every teacher, no more than I can appeal to the grace of every parent, but I do believe that we are both vulnerable to the manipulations of those with a larger platform, those in positions of power. And I do believe that this fragile partnership we share can benefit from a simple yet necessary reminder that we are both imperfect and capable of greatness, that we both cherish home as much as we love to see the world, and that we’re both working toward the success and future of every child we have in common.

When I fell out of my chair that day, when it crumbled underneath me without warning, this father, my old boss, told me he was moving his daughter to a different school. A hard decision, he said, but one their family had to make, because the cost of the drive was too much, too far from where they had recently moved. We spoke for a while about her challenges in math and the way our lives had crossed paths. Eventually, I said goodbye, got up off the floor, and took a deep breathe, fighting back the knot in my throat and the tears in my eyes.

Our relationship is not permanent or indestructible. At our best, we become friends, celebrating every new job, every new love, the eventual graduation of every child, together. At our worst, we never speak again. But somewhere in the middle, we learn to trust each other and make it from year to year, hoping and working, on both ends, so that these kids will be okay where they are. What we’ve never been and never will be is competitors.

We are partners. We will always be partners.