Well, it's been forever. I'm 2/3ds of the way through one of my longest uninterrupted streaks of teaching of the year, and it's taken a toll. Don't get me wrong, a lot of things are going really well. My principal and TFA PD have given me good feedback, somewhat alleviating my fears that I'm doing more harm than good in my classroom. After their rough performance on their first ANET benchmark, they bumped up to 35% basic and above (from 9%) on a network-wide quiz retesting the material. And yesterday, after a really rough week, my kids somehow managed to put up their best weekly quiz scores of the year: 42% basic and above, with 21% at mastery and above, even though the quiz was mostly on word problems.
These are all things that I'm really proud of. The culture in two of my three classes, the enthusiasm my kids have for after-school tutoring, the progress I've made with one of my kids with an emotional disturbance, both academically and behaviorally, with some well-placed positive calls home. As my principal and PD keep reminding me, my perception of how things are going in my classroom is usually skewed negatively from what they're seeing. I know that this is true: I'm hard on myself by nature, and I don't like to settle for anything less than perfect. I tend to focus on the three kids who are off-task rather than the 18 who are, or the five kids who don't get a problem than the 15 who are making progress. To keep myself sane, I'm trying my best to stay focused on the positives: the 3 kids this week who scored basic for the first time this year, or the girl who got an 80% on her quiz after struggling through word problems for two hours the day before in tutoring. But when there is still so much going wrong, it's sometimes hard to keep sight on the good stuff.
We had our first TFA regional summit today, and while it wasn't the most productive of ways to spend a Saturday, that, combined with my recent meetings with my PD, has gotten me thinking about how much farther I have to go to get my classroom to a place that is transformational for my students. TFA does pour a lot of Kool-Aid, and I don't always agree with everything they say or do. But I signed on for these two years not just to try my hand at teaching, but to change the lives of my students. Right now, I'm not in a place as a teacher where I am changing the lives of my students. Are they growing? Yes. Are they learning? Most of them, yes. But I'm not putting them on the path to college, or the path to achieving all of the awesome dreams they have for themselves.
Too often I get frustrated with them and forget to treat them with the respect they deserve as people--little people, but still people. Part of it is the exhaustion associated with having gone now four straight weeks without a day off, while family crises have hit almost every other teacher in my school and a stomach bug has wreaked havoc on us all for the last week (I have seen enough children vomit in places that are not the bathroom to last for quite some time). This is a really hard job to do, day in and day out, when you feel like the only people you really interact with on a daily basis are 8 or 9 years old.
Part of it is also the growing disconnect I feel with some of my friends from college or high school--people who I haven't seen in six months or more who don't really have a sense of what situations TFA presents you with. Whenever I tell a story about my day--about how a kid dove head-first into a trash can, or about how I finally executed an effective CPI hold to restrain a child and break up a fight, or about how I am struggling to teach word problems when my kids' average reading level is early first grade, already two years behind--I am usually met with dumbstruck silence. What I think I fail to let on most of the time is that even though this job sometimes seems impossible, I do love what I do. I love those 63 rascals even when I don't like them. And this work is more important and rewarding than anything I've ever done, in a way that has already begun to challenge the life path I thought I had laid out for myself.
I have only seven more months with my kiddos to try to make them reach the vision I set for them--to put them on the level that the top elementary school in the city, Lusher, puts its third-graders on. It's going to take a lot of hard work, and I'm looking forward to using my week off for Thanksgiving as a time to rest, reset, and come back ready to push my kids harder. One of the parents at the summit today said that her advice to teachers would be to give the kids your best, not what's left. I think a big part of the problem right now is that I'm so exhausted and sleep-deprived that my patience with my kids is too short, and by the time third block rolls around, all I want to do is yell and scream. Trying to focus on giving my kids the best of me, not the only energy I can muster, is one of my goals for post-Thanksgiving.
And, for my own sanity, I am so grateful that in just 13 short days, I will be getting on a flight to New York for eight full and wonderful days north of the Mason-Dixon line. Because as much as I love my job, I sure as hell could use a break.
These are all things that I'm really proud of. The culture in two of my three classes, the enthusiasm my kids have for after-school tutoring, the progress I've made with one of my kids with an emotional disturbance, both academically and behaviorally, with some well-placed positive calls home. As my principal and PD keep reminding me, my perception of how things are going in my classroom is usually skewed negatively from what they're seeing. I know that this is true: I'm hard on myself by nature, and I don't like to settle for anything less than perfect. I tend to focus on the three kids who are off-task rather than the 18 who are, or the five kids who don't get a problem than the 15 who are making progress. To keep myself sane, I'm trying my best to stay focused on the positives: the 3 kids this week who scored basic for the first time this year, or the girl who got an 80% on her quiz after struggling through word problems for two hours the day before in tutoring. But when there is still so much going wrong, it's sometimes hard to keep sight on the good stuff.
We had our first TFA regional summit today, and while it wasn't the most productive of ways to spend a Saturday, that, combined with my recent meetings with my PD, has gotten me thinking about how much farther I have to go to get my classroom to a place that is transformational for my students. TFA does pour a lot of Kool-Aid, and I don't always agree with everything they say or do. But I signed on for these two years not just to try my hand at teaching, but to change the lives of my students. Right now, I'm not in a place as a teacher where I am changing the lives of my students. Are they growing? Yes. Are they learning? Most of them, yes. But I'm not putting them on the path to college, or the path to achieving all of the awesome dreams they have for themselves.
Too often I get frustrated with them and forget to treat them with the respect they deserve as people--little people, but still people. Part of it is the exhaustion associated with having gone now four straight weeks without a day off, while family crises have hit almost every other teacher in my school and a stomach bug has wreaked havoc on us all for the last week (I have seen enough children vomit in places that are not the bathroom to last for quite some time). This is a really hard job to do, day in and day out, when you feel like the only people you really interact with on a daily basis are 8 or 9 years old.
Part of it is also the growing disconnect I feel with some of my friends from college or high school--people who I haven't seen in six months or more who don't really have a sense of what situations TFA presents you with. Whenever I tell a story about my day--about how a kid dove head-first into a trash can, or about how I finally executed an effective CPI hold to restrain a child and break up a fight, or about how I am struggling to teach word problems when my kids' average reading level is early first grade, already two years behind--I am usually met with dumbstruck silence. What I think I fail to let on most of the time is that even though this job sometimes seems impossible, I do love what I do. I love those 63 rascals even when I don't like them. And this work is more important and rewarding than anything I've ever done, in a way that has already begun to challenge the life path I thought I had laid out for myself.
I have only seven more months with my kiddos to try to make them reach the vision I set for them--to put them on the level that the top elementary school in the city, Lusher, puts its third-graders on. It's going to take a lot of hard work, and I'm looking forward to using my week off for Thanksgiving as a time to rest, reset, and come back ready to push my kids harder. One of the parents at the summit today said that her advice to teachers would be to give the kids your best, not what's left. I think a big part of the problem right now is that I'm so exhausted and sleep-deprived that my patience with my kids is too short, and by the time third block rolls around, all I want to do is yell and scream. Trying to focus on giving my kids the best of me, not the only energy I can muster, is one of my goals for post-Thanksgiving.
And, for my own sanity, I am so grateful that in just 13 short days, I will be getting on a flight to New York for eight full and wonderful days north of the Mason-Dixon line. Because as much as I love my job, I sure as hell could use a break.
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