Today, after a month of teaching in which I have been nearly immobilized by insecurities about my instructional ability, my classroom management, my seemingly-stagnant test scores, and my job security, I was finally having a good day. It was benchmark testing week, and the kids I was testing were quiet and diligent while taking their ELA and science tests. My only real class of the day was remarkably well-behaved considering they had just sat for nearly three hours of tests, and they successfully engaged in a cooperative learning activity to review for tomorrow's math test. And I spent the last hour and a half of the day doing reading testing, where student after student finally showed growth, with some of them showing more than a year's worth of growth in the last three months.
Then we had a parent conference in which we found out about the backstory about one of our most challenging students, and the tone of the whole day shifted.
I've spent a lot of this past weekend thinking about violence and crime in New Orleans, especially in the neighborhoods that my friends and I teach in. First there was the CNN story about "Murder City," which made concrete and tangible the facts that I really already knew about my city. Then there was the horrifying news that an eighth-grader at my roommate's school had been murdered on Friday night, shot in the back behind an abandoned house and not found until the next morning. And then today, hearing about the violent tendencies of one of my students (and all of the ways the education and medical systems have failed him and his family) and seeing how clear the path is for him from being an overage, angry third-grader to being on either side of the violent crime that got New Orleans the unfortunate title of 2011's Murder City.
There are dozens of reasons why my job is a challenge every day. Many of them are challenges that any teacher faces--how to differentiate learning for students at varying academic levels, how to navigate convoluted school politics, how to invest students in a scary state standardized test, and how to manage the behavior of a classroom full of precocious, squirmy eight-year-olds. But some of them are unique to the city, neighborhood, and socioeconomic status of my students. When I watch my students put their fists up over an argument about a passing comment, a pencil, or even a look, I remember that many of them haven't learned the sort of conflict resolution skill that I picked up in preschool. When I get frustrated over their unfinished homework, their eye-rolling, or their verbal disrespect, I remember that too many of them go home to people who are not their parents, to dinner tables without food, or to no home at all. I've watched as one student coped with her father's murder, as another's behavior became disruptive after his two teenage cousins were shot and killed. There are undoubtedly others who have had their lives disrupted in this way, either this year or in the past. This is one of the biggest challenges of my job--how can I seem genuine to these kids? How can I really help them with these situations too mature even for me? These are questions that I struggle with every day.
Among all of my stresses, I'm trying to follow the advice of my TFA advisor: focus on the kids and everything else will fall into place. As we move away from interim testing and into the final month-long push before iLEAP testing begins, recognizing this world that my kids come from will be crucial as I figure out how to get them invested in this nebulous test that they've never experienced before. It doesn't make my job any easier, because I can never change the fact that I didn't grow up in the same way that they did. But every day, as I see my students set goals for themselves and achieve them, I see more and more of them starting to understand that education is the way to break the cycle of poverty and violence--the way to remove that "Murder City" tagline from the beautiful city of New Orleans.
Then we had a parent conference in which we found out about the backstory about one of our most challenging students, and the tone of the whole day shifted.
I've spent a lot of this past weekend thinking about violence and crime in New Orleans, especially in the neighborhoods that my friends and I teach in. First there was the CNN story about "Murder City," which made concrete and tangible the facts that I really already knew about my city. Then there was the horrifying news that an eighth-grader at my roommate's school had been murdered on Friday night, shot in the back behind an abandoned house and not found until the next morning. And then today, hearing about the violent tendencies of one of my students (and all of the ways the education and medical systems have failed him and his family) and seeing how clear the path is for him from being an overage, angry third-grader to being on either side of the violent crime that got New Orleans the unfortunate title of 2011's Murder City.
There are dozens of reasons why my job is a challenge every day. Many of them are challenges that any teacher faces--how to differentiate learning for students at varying academic levels, how to navigate convoluted school politics, how to invest students in a scary state standardized test, and how to manage the behavior of a classroom full of precocious, squirmy eight-year-olds. But some of them are unique to the city, neighborhood, and socioeconomic status of my students. When I watch my students put their fists up over an argument about a passing comment, a pencil, or even a look, I remember that many of them haven't learned the sort of conflict resolution skill that I picked up in preschool. When I get frustrated over their unfinished homework, their eye-rolling, or their verbal disrespect, I remember that too many of them go home to people who are not their parents, to dinner tables without food, or to no home at all. I've watched as one student coped with her father's murder, as another's behavior became disruptive after his two teenage cousins were shot and killed. There are undoubtedly others who have had their lives disrupted in this way, either this year or in the past. This is one of the biggest challenges of my job--how can I seem genuine to these kids? How can I really help them with these situations too mature even for me? These are questions that I struggle with every day.
Among all of my stresses, I'm trying to follow the advice of my TFA advisor: focus on the kids and everything else will fall into place. As we move away from interim testing and into the final month-long push before iLEAP testing begins, recognizing this world that my kids come from will be crucial as I figure out how to get them invested in this nebulous test that they've never experienced before. It doesn't make my job any easier, because I can never change the fact that I didn't grow up in the same way that they did. But every day, as I see my students set goals for themselves and achieve them, I see more and more of them starting to understand that education is the way to break the cycle of poverty and violence--the way to remove that "Murder City" tagline from the beautiful city of New Orleans.
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