Winter Reflections

I'm not really sure how to reflect...I still don't feel like a teacher, or know that much about teaching, yet I suppose I am teaching, most days. Sometimes I would just love to kick back and hang out with my kids, there are some truly great ones, but that would make the fact that I look younger than them anyway even worse.

I know I've come a long way, that I have started learning what it takes to actually teach a large group of students a substantial amount of information while keeping them somewhat interested...that I have just tipped my toes in the pool of genuine discipline that will help shape my students into adults. I think a lot of us would admit we don't really know what we're doing. I take it day by day, never knowing what program or state-testing will be taking place during the day that we will not be informed of before-hand, and only to find out after some my students tell me about it, which will of course greatly interfere with my lesson plans (if they are done).

The summer training attempted to be a "boot camp" to get us in shape as quickly as possible. Although some of the classes were helpful, such as the team-teaching, there really is nothing that could have truly prepared us. You can't know what it's like to be in a school, in a classroom, full of 20 odd students who don't necessarily want to learn anything you are supposed to teach them, under an under-staffed and over-worked administration. How could you be trained for that, how could you prepare? You hear the stories, you learn about the history and culture, but every school is different. Even within the same school, teaching the same subjects, each one of my classes has a very different mood, demeanor, work ethic, sense of humor, and within that class each has its remarkable students, its clowns, and the ones who simply don't try, giving up before they have even started. It's this delicate balance, this intricate network of people, that makes it impossible to formulate one method to teach, and be able to teach someone to teach.

And even after it's all been said and done, and a gradebook and senior dues money have been stolen (yes), I still love teaching. I still love my kids...too much unfortunately because I let them get away with way too much. I just don't want to send the kid out who talks way too much and can't sit still when I know he's smart enough (if he applied himself) and needs to be in the class to hear the lesson. But I've gotta send them out, I have to for the sake of my sanity, and for the other students, and even for that disruptive student, because otherwise he/she will never learn, but I seem unable to learn this.

The most rewarding feeling is to actually witness children learning because of me... several of my students argued with the chemistry teacher over an order of operations rule, that she had done incorrectly, that I had taught them correctly months back. All of the students coming to our (Brooke and I) ACT tutorial have increased their scores...there are other small triumphs , and this is what I have to remember when K. and L. and N. pour water into each other's seats so they will sit in it and get their "booties wet", and my 5th period class doesn't shut up, again, and a long evening of tutorial, then duty, then basketball duty selling tickets by the freezing door....as our sweet wonderful amazing 89-year-old neighbor (who has the energy level of a twenty-something year old) says, "It's good that you're still young."