Whenever I Walk Into the Classroom, I Think About Going Back to the Army
A teacher-turned-soldier faces the past he left behind and the school he returned to
It’s been 12 years since I last wore a military uniform, and nearly 20 since I set down the dry-erase markers, putting my teaching career on hold to serve as a sergeant in the Portuguese Army.
I see life as a rollercoaster, which explains why my path was one of ups and downs. The person I am today is a chimera of many lives. I’m still the boy who went from high school dropout to valedictorian, and the teacher who traded the classroom for the barracks.
I am Legion, for we are many. — Mark 5:9
Order and chaos
The first time I found myself in the assembly hall of the Portuguese Sergeants’ School, listening to our company commander, my mind wandered to my classroom.
A year earlier, the roles were reversed. I was the one standing at the front, the “captain” of my students’ class. But life as a teacher took an unexpected turn when I failed to secure a spot in the national teaching competition, and I found myself in the unemployment ranks.
I couldn’t stand doing nothing for a whole year.
One day, I stumbled across a different kind of contest. It was a call for Army candidates. During college, I had always postponed my mandatory military service. But this time I thought:
What the heck, why not give it a shot? Let’s call it a sabbatical.
Instead of sitting back at home doing nothing, I figured I could serve for a year before going back to school. So, what began as a temporary fix turned into a nearly decade-long experience.
That, in broad strokes, is how I ended up at boot camp.
What the army taught me about limits
I used to joke about how I went from “ballpoint” to “full metal jacket,” as a way to metaphorically explain how the army changed me. I needed to be more, to do more. And the Army stripped away my excuses to become someone who could be counted on.
We all have so much untapped potential because of our mind-limiting constructs and life-thwarting barriers. While in the army, I realized I could do almost anything, as long as I fully committed. In the end, it’s not our ability holding us back. It’s our beliefs.
Army life is hard. No doubt about it. School life shouldn’t be as hard, but nowadays, some of us teachers walk into the classroom feeling like we are being deployed to a battlefield. And this feels all kinds of wrong; teaching should never feel like that.
A different kind of theater
During my time at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto, I learned how the classroom should be a peaceful space designed to foster a positive learning environment. “where all students, educators, and employees experience a safe, healthy, caring, and nurturing atmosphere.” (Julien, 2023).
This “ideal classroom” was nothing like the one I encountered in 2003 during my teaching internship.
As a young, inexperienced teacher, dealing with the real classroom felt worlds apart from what I had read in college textbooks.
The real school is a complex environment full of challenges, and the classroom is a demanding “theater of operations,” constantly putting our knowledge, emotional intelligence, and resilience to the test.
School is not a building, it’s the people.
Taking on a teacher’s role implies being an excellent manager of interpersonal relationships, and my first students’ class showed me how to be a good teacher, it’s not enough to master the subject you’re teaching. Equally important is knowing each student well and having a genuine empathy for their true goals and expectations.
Challenges of the real school
I love being a teacher. For me, the teaching/learning process goes far beyond the school walls.
This is why I try to apply this premise to everything I do, as research shows “teachers who apply outdoor education have reported many positive effects on job satisfaction, teaching practices, health, well-being, and psychological resilience (Akarsu, 2024).”
As mentioned in this study, “there is a need for every worker in any institution or organization to derive satisfaction in what they are doing, as job satisfaction determines the workers’ efficiency,” and if I may add, also their health and well-being.
So, as I did almost twenty years ago, teachers are now leaving my country’s educational system and looking for other jobs, probably due to an increasing lack of job satisfaction.
Thus, the role of teachers is an ongoing issue for education systems, and our schools are among the most demanding professional environments. Long hours, high stakes, emotional strain, and teachers always have to take their work home with all it implies.
Nowadays, a teacher’s pace of life keeps accelerating, and at some point, the amount of tasks becomes overwhelming, which can lead even the most experienced teachers close to burnout.
A recent study by Ana Isabel Mota notes how “teaching has been identified as an environment of extreme physical, mental, and cognitive demand for teachers and is one of the careers where burnout levels are the highest.” So we need a new approach to the unique challenges and evolving dynamics of the classroom to mitigate the current prevalence of burnout.
Teachers have to keep up with the times and realize once and for all how the students we meet at the start of the school year are nothing like the students we had twenty years ago. They need more attention and care than prior generations, and as schools struggle to recruit and retain these youngest students, questions on what these students need to succeed are pushed to the forefront (Miller et al, 2019).
My students today are nothing like the student I once was, and I can’t be like the teachers I had back then either.
There are many cases of violence against teachers in Portuguese schools. These episodes of violence in the school context are not the work of chance and are often the result of factors outside the school itself.
A study explains how violence in schools may be associated with macro-level factors. So it affects our society as a whole. Once again, emphasizing why we need a systemic approach.
There are repeated cases of teachers being attacked by their pupils. Some of the accounts I’ve heard first-hand are indescribable. I don’t even dare to describe them here because these were episodes of extreme violence, which often end up with the teacher in the hospital without the school system doing anything more than suspending the student and putting the teacher on sick leave.
Expelling the student from the school environment is not a systemic measure. It only promotes absenteeism and deepens the students’ disillusionment with the system and, in a way, reinforces the disruptive behavior.
So, the United Nations has noted how we need a process of systemic reform able to provide all students with an equitable and participatory learning experience and environment most suited to their requirements and preferences.
Here in Portugal, following the last education reform in 2018, there has been a push to develop inclusive schools where students, regardless of their personal and social situation, can find responses and meet their potential, expectations, and needs. (Alves et al, 2020)
Still, the level of violence at school is something no teacher can ignore. I’ve been lucky and have never been harassed, but I don’t know what the future holds, and listening to the stories of other teachers, I can’t help but think about it every time I enter the classroom. I have to be prepared to give my best.
Will I stay?
I don’t know why I keep thinking about my time in the army. When my tour contract was over, I spent five years working for an NGO funded by the European Commission, and going back to Brussels never crossed my mind.
I guess there was too much chaos in Brussels European Quarter, and from what I’ve read recently, things are only getting worse for NGOs.
So, as I have said before, military life is hard. It brings out a side of us, we haven’t met before. But during my time in the ranks, I felt there was an order to all this chaos encircling us.
Today’s school, like the social reality in which we live, is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, and full of challenges even for an Army veteran like me.
I don’t know if I will be teaching at a public school in the coming year. Right now, my mind is set on going back to doing voluntary work and teaching Portuguese to foreign students.
One thing I know for sure, I can’t ever go back to the Army unless my country goes to war. God forbid. I extended my commission as far as possible. Still, I can’t help looking back with a bit of nostalgia. I miss the order and camaraderie of the Army. I don’t deny it.
So, I probably won’t stay for another year in the public school system. Eventually, I’ll go back to the classroom, but not back to school. I want to teach beyond the fringes of the national system and enjoy the freedom of a less politicized curriculum.
One of the brightest educators of our time, José Pacheco, who launched an innovative pedagogic approach of an open school at Escola da Ponte here in my town, says today’s school runs outside our constitution’s prime directives and on the fringes of educational science. He explains how it is necessary to tear up a school model dating back to the 19th century, which “condemns to ignorance” and does not fulfill the right to “education for all”.
“School is not a building, it’s the people,” says José Pacheco. And I couldn’t agree more.
Next time I walk into a classroom, and I look at all those eager faces staring back at me, I’ll remember José Pacheco’s words, “a teacher doesn’t teach what he says, but shares what he is, He conveys the skills he is invested with.” Only then will I know exactly what I’m truly fighting for.
There are those who fight for a day and they are good. There are those who fight for a year and they are better. There are those who fight many years, and they are better still. And then, there are those who fight for a lifetime: These are the indispensable ones. — Bertolt Brecht
Rui Alves is a language teacher, published author, international book judge, and publisher. He runs Alchemy Publications and serves as editor-in-chief for Engage on Substack, Life Unscripted, Musicverse, Writelicious, The Academic, Portugal Calling, Engage on Medium, Rock n’ Heavy, Beloved, Zenite, Poetaph, Grind, and Babel.
This article first appeared on The Academic.
References
Akarsu, A. H., “Beyond the walls: Investigating outdoor learning experiences of social studies teacher candidates in Türkiye,” Teaching and Teacher Education, Volume 154, 2025, 104876, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2024.104876.
Alves, I.Met al., “Developing inclusive education in Portugal: Evidence and challenges.” Prospects 49, 281–296, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09504-y.
Julien, G., “Creating a Positive Learning Environment, American Research Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences” 9(1), DOI:10.21694/2378 7031.23012, 2023.
Miller, A. C, Mills, B., “If They Don’t Care, I Don’t Care’: Millennial and Generation Z Students and the Impact of Faculty Caring” Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Vol. 19, Nº 4, 2019, pp.78–89, 2019. DOI: 10.14434/josotl.v19i4.24167.
Mota A. I et al., “Teachers’ Voices: A Qualitative Study on Burnout in the Portuguese Educational System.” Educ. Sci. 2021, 11, 392, 2021. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11080392.
Your unique perspective as a soldier and an educator who knows so many languages helps you see the battlefield students are struggling on clearly. The level of social and economic pressure faced by students when in high school and post secondary school is high. Learning how complex the lives of students moving week to week between parents who are separated - shows there is little continuity.
Being both a conservative and yet progressive was possible when I was a child. Now holding two different viewpoints on the same situation is deemed impossible and disloyal by ultra wings that are present in every school.
Children are facing mounting expectations while the systems that once offered support are crumbling.
Teachers can’t do everything that families, churches, and communities once did in a complementary way for children.
We burnout trying to be all things for our students.
No one is able to do this task.
We have public schools here in the US too, especially in the cities with violent students. Not to mention the problem with shooters. But I think some of that comes from cultural upheaval due to resistance to change.
The US has whitewashed history by leaving out migrant and black history in the establishment of the country, simple math is taught in a convoluted way that children need calculators to it, languages, art, music are all but forgotten and so many can’t/don’t read when they graduate. I’ve seen this over the decades.
Schools are no longer challenging, but large daycare centers. I think the trend to put 40 children in a classroom and expect them to learn anything is more than a challenge for any teacher. And teachers here are looking elsewhere for jobs. Burnout.
It pains me to think that this is a world problem. I remember being challenged everyday in school and learning to push myself to be better. I guess those days are long gone.