five days in

It is Saturday morning, and I have just woken up from my first night of remotely close to a good night's sleep in a week (nine whole hours!). My first week of teaching is in the books, and I have survived without major incident. A few brief lessons I've learned this week (and just to note, all the names of my students have been changed to protect them):

1. Teaching--anywhere, but especially in a low-income school--is hard. Really hard. When I'm up in front of my classroom, there are a million things I have to think about: what I'm teaching, if I'm writing it big enough on the board for everyone to see it, if I'm explaining things in a way that make sense to 8th graders, if everyone's paying attention/if the class clowns are distracting their classmates behind my back, how many times I've given each kid a warning, whether I'm putting points on the board, etc. I'm struggling to break concepts down in a way that my students can understand, and I'm struggling most of all with the wide range of comprehension in my classroom. I have students who range from a second-grade reading level to a ninth-grade reading level in my classroom, so when teaching a lesson, it's really hard to explain it on a level that Benton might understand while still keeping Jarvis engaged in the material. I can't blame Jarvis for acting out when he gets it right away and I have to spend time repeating material over and over again for his classmates who are struggling.


2. The achievement gap is bigger than I could have even imagined. I was working with one of my students, Anton, who is incredibly driven and wants so badly to pass the math CRCT so he can go to high school and eventually become an architect, during lunch yesterday. He is so focused in class and had scored above an 80% on every assessment I've given him this week except for one--Thursday's lesson on finding the pattern in a sequence of numbers. Anton understood the concept, but got tripped up with the difference between subtraction and division--he literally didn't know the difference. I pulled out a bag of Starburst and tried to show him physically what the difference is, and he seemed to get it. But now I know what's holding him back from success in eighth grade math: what he didn't learn back in second or third grade. That's the most intimidating part: how do you hold high expectations for your students and push and push them to master eighth grade objectives when they still need to use their fingers to multiply 2x3?

3. My kids are incredible. We're still learning how to reach all of them on an individual level--we think we just figured it out with Jarvis on Friday, which will help classroom management immensely--but there have been so many moments when I have just been lit up inside by my students. The way Anton talks about how he wants to be an architect, or learning that Jarvis has gotten 100% on every single reading assessment this week, or seeing Dionne's face when she got her first perfect score on a math assessment, or hearing Sage's exclamation of "I am smart!" when she opened up her folder and saw a gold star (representing 100% mastery) on an exit assessment. On their Friday assessment this week, when they were given a question representative of each math lesson they had had from Jon and myself this week, two out of eight got 75% and three more got 68%. Not a single one of these kids had scored above a 45% on their pretest, with the lowest coming in at 20%. That was definitely a step in the right direction, and it made me realize that, despite all of my insecurities about my abilities/inabilities as a teacher, most of my kids actually were learning this week. I needed that to get me through.

4. I'm not good at this--at least not yet. Like most of my fellow corps members, I did not make it through this week without a breakdown. Most of us have cried at some point this week, whether it was at school because of something a kid said or a lesson that didn't go well, or at home on the phone or with friends about how it all wasn't fair. My behavior management is okay, but not at all consistent. I confuse my kids far more often than I should. Many times, they walk away from a lesson missing one of the key points needed to really master the objective. I don't know how to get some of my kids to care. My advisor keeps reminding me that I need to focus on the positives, and that as a first-week teacher, I'm actually way ahead of the curve. But pretty much everyone in TFA is a perfectionist, and we are all frustrated that this isn't coming easily to us. I know a lot of us, myself included, feel terrible that these students who are at such high risk are serving as our guinea pigs. I constantly feel like they deserve better from a teacher in a situation like this, when they really need to pass this test in three weeks.

5. I've already got a great support network here in Atlanta. While it's been so great to have friends and family on the other end of the phone (or, more often, on Gchat, since I have so little time to actually communicate with the real world), it's also really great to have roommates, friends, and advisors here who are wonderful. I'm really looking forward to this weekend, which is Thea's birthday weekend--we have a lot of fun stuff planned. Thea, Mallory, Alyssa and I went to the Braves game last night, which was the perfect Friday night activity (very chill, nice to hang out with people and see something of Atlanta that isn't Georgia Tech and my middle school, and still home and in bed by midnight). Today, after a full day of lesson prep, we're going out to dinner and out on the town to celebrate Thea's birthday, and then tomorrow (the actual big day), we're going to Six Flags. It should be a great weekend and will hopefully rejuvenate me for another exhausting week of teaching.

Still 100% happy with my choice to teach for the next two years. I knew it was going to be hard, and now I have a much better sense of how hard it's actually going to be. But I feel like my work is going to mean something because of the effect it will have on the kids in my classroom. I just hope I can be the kind of teacher they deserve.
Side note: congrats to the Bruins! It killed Alyssa and me to be here this week rather than in Boston (we tried to watch the end of Game 7, and the only TV in our dorm complex didn't have NBC. Devastating.).