by Kim Culbertson
In the movie Roxanne with Steve Martin, C.D. (Martin’s Cyrano character) gets challenged to come up with twenty “better” insults about his nose than the doofus in the bar who called him “big nose.” For each insult, he gives little categories like “meteorological” or “envious” or “philosophical” before his “better” version. I’ve shown the scene often over my 29 years in high school education as a quirky introduction to why I love writing – because being specific and interesting is always better than being bland. Besides, writing is about challenging yourself to think beyond the cliché, the already-been-done, and come up with something fresh. In that bar scene in Roxanne, I’ve always loved the extra challenge of that categorical part of how he showed up his bully, so for this list of “Ten Things I Will Miss About Teaching High School,” I’m going to give each number a category too:
- Sentimental: Teaching has been such a huge part of my identity for the better part of three decades (and not just teaching, teaching teenagers). As much as I’m looking forward to a different sort of calendar, I will miss the natural rhythm of the school year. It’s been a compass for almost my entire life.
- Practical: The clear, simple reason to put on grown-up clothes in the morning.
Visual: My students have always left little treasures for me like a tiny duck the size of my thumbnail placed on top of my laptop or this crafty replica of my dog, Ginny. There is something especially sweet and random about the teenage gift-giving process.
- Random: Teacher Memes. Am I still allowed to find them relatable?
- Bittersweet: The Velcro kiddos. That one kid who finds a reason to stop by and talk to you even when they aren’t in your class anymore and even when you 100% don’t have time to be talking to this young one because you have photocopies to make and you haven’t peed since 7:00 am and you likely forgot your lunch in the car.
- Nostalgic: I saw a photo on Facebook recently of the time I directed The Tempest decades ago and I missed that feeling of standing on a stage during curtain call with an incredible cast of hard-working teens who had just put months into my strange adaptation of Shakespeare. Shakespeare!
- Sacred: The other day, I stood in the hallway with another teacher and our Academic Dean, and we were swapping stories and laughing, and I knew that I was in a sacred moment, this type of exchange that only people who’ve been doing this work a long time could feel, and only people who love that work.
- Olfactory: Some mornings, especially in the early fall and spring, the green smell from the freshly cut grass field comes in through an open window and I am struck with how lucky I’ve been to be part of a campus.
- Poetic: And on those grassy mornings, I hear the younger kids (my current school is K-12) laughing in the play yard and I hear the teenagers running up and down the staircases and I think there is nothing in the world quite like that sound. There is something about it that is life-affirming. We should be protecting this space at all costs.
- Obvious: I wouldn’t have stayed in this work this long (since 1997!) if I hadn’t loved it. It will always be part of me – in my bones and heart and in all the visceral, deep ways this work resides in us forever.
Kim holds an M.S. in Education and an MFA in Fiction. After 29 years in a variety of classrooms, she retired from teaching high school in June of 2026. She is the award-winning author of five YA novels. Her titles Catch a Falling Star; The Possibility of Now; and The Wonder of Us were Scholastic book club selections. She won the Northern California Book Award for YA fiction for Instructions for a Broken Heart as well as had The Possibility of Now named a Bank Street Best Book of the Year. Her first novel for adults, Other People’s Kids (Sibylline 2025) is about (surprise, surprise) teachers, and was named a finalist for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance (CALIBA) 2025 Golden Poppy Award in fiction. In addition to teaching high school, Kim sits on the Writers Council for National Writing Project and works as a fiction mentor with Dominican University of California’s MFA in Creative Writing. With 100-Word Stories: A Short Form for Expansive Writing (Heinemann 2023), Kim finally found a way to blend her two professional loves, teaching and writing, into one book. These small, bright things have transformed her classroom and her own writing. She loves sharing their potential with other teachers and writers. www.kimculbertson.com
