Monday, Monday…. can’t trust (myself) that day

I’m realizing that my mind plays tricks on itself…like clockwork, the same tricks every week. EVERY Friday- without fail- I delude myself into believing that next week will be GREAT! I stay late at school, grade student work, slap a half dozen new positive messages on the few remaining open inches of wall space, decide on yet another organizational system to ‘help things run a bit more smoothly,’ and go home high on Mr. Sketch marker fumes and optimism.

Next week… yeah!

Then Saturday comes… an overwhelming sense of entitlement washes over me as I roll out of bed a couple hours later than I do M-F. I am not doing ANY work today. I DESERVE this day off. Suddenly all of my brilliantly ambitious Friday afternoon ideas seem less urgent. I somehow believe that everything can be accomplished on Sunday. New seating charts! New grading systems! New discipline measures! New lessons! Grad assignments! SUNDAY!!! No problem. I’ve got allll day Sunday. Today is SATURDAY, and the world is my playground! So off I go to explore NYC and enjoy my day- usually with my fun, wonderful, infinitely supportive boyfriend.

Infinitely supportive? Why yes. Because when Sunday and its infinite to-do list strikes in all its horror, he is still with me, left to deal with a whole new person. He fell asleep with a happy, relaxed, fun-loving girlfriend, and woke up to a frazzled, disgruntled woman who resents everyone who doesn’t work 12 hours, 6 days/week. Watch out. I am admittedly unpleasant company on Sundays.

So I spend Sunday cranking out lessons and grad papers and grading assignments that force me to accept that my students aren’t learning a fraction of what I so desperately want them to. Then the self-doubt. Am I a bad teacher? Why aren’t they learning more? How is it possible that I still haven’t succeeded at making them want to learn? What’s wrong with me? I bet all the other first year teachers out there have made more progress than me. I suck. That’s the only explanation.

Then frustration and self ridicule. Then hyperactive work ethic to overcompensate. Ok. Fine. Maybe I’ve sort of sucked at getting them invested up to this point, but NOW I’m going to work even harder to make sure I have killer lessons that you’d have to be brain dead not to enjoy and learn from! So I work like a beast for several hours straight, stopping only to make manic comments to Infinitely Supportive, ranging from “I rule! This lesson is brilliant!” to “For the love of god, HOW is posting this annoying grad assignment taking me so long? Can you email the idiots who run this terrible site and tell them how to fix this?”

Productive. Progress. Good stuff. But not enough. The 6pm bell in my mind tolls. (I have a finely tuned internal clock.) This is the home stretch. Just three and a half hours until I’d ideally be in bed for a perfect eight hours of sleep to start my week strong, and I’m hungry, so that whole eating thing is going to cost me some time. Estimated number of hours of work remaining: 6. Sonofa!!! Ok. No new seating chart. No new grading system. No draft of a school wide detention plan. Just the essentials. Finish up the must-dos. Table the should dos.

I usually make it to bed around 10, but I tend not to sleep well on Sunday nights. When the alarm goes off at 5:30am, I groan with dread. I just CAN’T get up. I’m soooo tired! Infinitely Supportive gives me an encouraging hug and wishes me a great day, eager for me to get up so he can sprawl out and sleep diagonally for four more hours. Envy. Then shower.

My shower readies me for my day. It’s game time. As I make my way to work, I return to my Friday afternoon belief that it’s going to be a great week. I worked hard yesterday. I’ve got a small arsenal of solidly interesting lesson plans loaded up on my clipboard in my backpack. I’m ready for my great week now.

Monday wears on, and the passing of each class period deflates me a bit more. This doesn’t look, sound or feel like the beginnings of a great week. In fact. This blows. They’re not listening. They’re not doing the assignments. They’re still throwing paper balls. They’re still yelling. Still cursing. Still not learning half of what I’m trying to teach. Annoyed students who feel they are being overworked and inconvenienced by my instructions yell out, “Miss! It’s Monday! We shouldn’t haffta do no work!” Through their actions, the majority of my students communicate to me that they would prefer to be ignorant.

I go home sad and frustrated. Sad because MY students aren’t learning. MY students who I care deeply about, who I work very hard for, who I want the best for, who still do not show me the respect I should have earned months ago. Frustrated with their resistance. Frustrated with my emotional attachment to my work and my inability to follow everyone’s advice NOT to let it bring me down. Frustrated that I’ve tricked myself yet again into believing this week will be different. Frustrated that I don’t have an answer for friends and family who ask me why I thought so.

Monday, Monday…

Good stuff

Today was a good day.

I got in a big, loud argument with my principal about the total absence of a discipline system in our school. Examples: A student threatened me, and the principal had no plans of suspending her or taking any other action. Yesterday, another student brought a knife to school, and he was sitting in all of his regular classes today as if nothing had happened. Another student called me a dumb bitch today, and still another told me that he was about to deck me. No real consequences for any of the above.

So I let it all out behind the principal’s closed office door, expressing that I find something very wrong with the fact that we pay no attention to students’ or teachers’ safety. I explained that there HAVE to be some intermediary steps between a teacher saying, “Hey stop doing that,” and a suspension- because we only do suspensions for the most serious offenses, like physically injuring someone. Our school is in utter chaos because of the absence of those intermediary steps.

BUT

As I said, today was a good day. Despite all of the above. Drumroll please... I made a student LIKE a book. Go ahead. Laugh. "It's mid-March!" you say. "You're an English teacher!" you say. "You're supposed to be making kids like books every day." Psssh. In my 7.5 months of teaching, I have had very few breakthroughs with my students. I've cracked the shells of some very reluctant writers, and I've won over some tough personalities, but I definitely haven't "reached" nearly as many kids as I'd hoped when I first started, and though I hate to say it, I have not led many kids to like many books. BUT TODAY I DID!!! :)

It was fantastic! We were just talking through the plot of the book and analyzing some of the characters when I realized that she had missed some of the big points in the book because she didn't pick up on some of the simple clues along the way.

Anyway, it got me thinking about a couple things:

#1: I wish that classwide novels weren't damned under Balanced Literacy curriculum because it's kind of impossible for me to read 60 young adult novels at a time. So I can't have these in-depth meaningful conversations with all of my students because I haven't always read what they're reading. If we could do class-wide novels, yes, some kids would find them too easy and others would find them too difficult, but that's what the classwork and small group discussions would be for. We could all learn new vocabulary together, analyze plots, characters, etc. But under Balanced Literacy- which is what NYC is all about right now- every student reads their own book at their own level. The teacher then conducts reading conferences to check their comprehension and help them along. This is an excellent idea if the teacher has read every book in the classroom library. I have not. I have a feeling I will love Balanced Literacy after I have a few more years of experience under my belt. But right now, I'm finding it difficult for our conferences to be meaningful and helpful because I haven't read a lot of their books. I'm especially struggling with teaching and assessing vocabulary. I need to consult with more experienced teachers on how to do a better job of this.

#2: I've been reading a lot of YA novels, but I obviously need to burn through them more quickly.

#3: My students don't hate everything I put in front of them just for the sake of hating it and being difficult. They're probably just not GETTING a lot of it. You read exactly that in every teaching book out there, but it's still sometimes hard to convince yourself that the kid isn't just being a brat when they're screaming out in the middle of class. "All these books SUCK!" Even though we have tons of 4th and 5th grade level books in our 7th grade library, some of my students are still not fully understanding the plots and characters. This is good to know- and actually believe, as opposed to just describing this phenomenon and still believing the kids are being brats.

#4: I like my job sometimes. :)

Ok, off to grade lots-n-lots-n-lots of assignments because I'm behind. Oops.

Ooo-oooooo chiiild, things are gonna get easier...

Or are they? No, seriously. It's March. I've been singing this Oo-ooo child song to myself everyday after school for six months now. Is it possible that my theme song is total bullshit?! I shudder at the mere thought! :)

Honestly though, things in my classroom are still pretty horrendous. Sure, now each of my classes might have one period/week (out of the 10 periods that I teach them)that I can nod my head and say, "Eh, that was decent. They were kind of listening, and I think some of them actually got it." But that leaves 9 periods/week of: WTF?! Why are they so freaking opposed to learning something?! Why do they refuse to put forth any effort?!

I SWEAR I'm a relatively interesting teacher. We do role plays, I bring in music, I read them some of my own journal entries, we've done book clubs, I find books, stories, and articles that they can relate to. I mix up group work, individual work, and whole-class discussions. In theory, there should be something for everyone in my classroom. But they don't seem to see it. All of my attempts generate the same response: "This is mad dumb/gay/boring/whack, etc. !"

I'm a teacher, but on days like today, that role falls by the wayside and I become a zookeeper/babysitter/corrections officer. And I make less money than the school janitors and the city bus drivers. But that's a seperate post...

My concern right now is fixing those 9 hellish periods/wk. As much as my kids really piss me off on days like this when they get completely out of control and treat me like crap, I really do care about their education, and I do lose sleep over the thought of them not learning in my class. They're already so far behind in their reading and writing levels. If they don't make some serious progress in my class, they're just going to keep getting further and further behind, and that disturbs me... A lot.

But I think what really keeps me up at night is thinking about the handful of kids in each class who really do want to learn but are getting short changed because there are enough kids in the room who would rather act like turds and keep us from getting through our lessons. There is no worse feeling on earth than looking apologetically at a frustrated student who is nonverbally begging you to shut the rest of the class up so they can learn something. It's an absolutely helpless, awful feeing. I'm thinking of one student in particular as I write this. This girl's eyes never leave me throughout any given class period. She's always attentive, always respectful, always taking notes, turning her homework in on time, etc. Sweetest student in the school. But when her bright, hopeful, attentive eyes get that angry look because the class (and therefor the lesson) has derailed, I want to sit down and cry- or pluck her from the room and go teach her one-on-one, leaving the others to go on being turds on their own time.

I don't mean to sound like I want to give up on the ones who are being turds. If that were the case, I'd have quit a long time ago. Most of my students have a lot of issues that trigger their ridiculous behavior which, in turn, keeps them from learning much in school. So I try to be empathetic of that. I try to just work harder to make the lessons more interesting, or meet with the main instigators one-on-one to troubleshoot. I'm sure that there's a way to 'reach' my kids despite their issues, but I haven't found it yet, and that's giving me an ulcer. Things do not seem to be getting much easier. :(

But I'm going to keep singing that song because it makes me happy.

I'm not a corps member. I'm a NYC public school teacher.

Maybe it's because I am the only TFA corps member at my school. Maybe it's because I've been really put off by the alcohol drenched TFA social scene and have therefor really only connected well with a handful of fellow corps members. Maybe it's because I've grown somewhat disillusioned after realizing that just working harder and harder and harder still might not be enough to change some things in my classroom, no matter what my TFA training told me.

Whatever combination of these factors might be at play, I do not really associate myself with TFA. I am a New York City public school teacher. And though it will send me to a earlier grave than probably any other career choice I could have made, I do feel some pride in that title. Much more pride than when someone refers to me as a "corps member."

Between my experience at the education nonprofit that worked with eight messed up public elementary schools in DC, and my work now that has me in the trenches of a remarkably disfunctional NYC public school, I have grown angry, passionate, and emotionally invested in urban education. So I think I want to stay in it for the long haul. Living a long life is overrated, right? I'll just live a short, crazy one. :) I haven't decided yet in what capacity, but I think I belong in education. Right now, I'm liking the idea of getting into administration, but we'll see. Anyway, I think 'NYC public school teacher' implies a long-term professional career choice, while 'corps member' implies a short-term bout of blind idealism straight out of college. I had my curious, do-gooder year as an Americorps volunteer last year. I signed up for TFA because I wanted to get my foot in the door to education as affordably as possible- and keep it there.

There is no real reason for or clear focus to this post. I just returned from 8 1/2 hours of grad school classes with all of the other TFA NYC '05 corps members. These classes generally make me reflect on three things:

1. I really like studying, talking about, and working in education- even if I dramatically claim on some days that it's the worst job on earth. :)
2. I feel absolutely no connection to TFA.
3. Am I socially awkward?

We have these all-day classes once/month, and the rest of our work is done online. Which means that I'm only made keenly aware of my total lack of TFA connections once every four weeks. And that's enough for me. I should probably put more effort into getting more connected and cultivating more TFA friendships, but the truth is that I'd just rather not. This isn't a jab at TFA, TFA culture, or TFA people. They're people who work hard and play hard. That part is fine. But at no point in my TFA journey have I ever felt that I was actually a part of it. I have such limited contact with anything TFA related that when I am at a TFA function, I feel awkward and out of place.

I have this socially backward need to get to know people, find them interesting, get comfortable with them, and become friends with them before I can have much fun drinking with them. But in TFA... and most any business or organization, it works in the opposite order. You go to socials and happy hours, drink to lose your inhibitions, and then become friends. The only time that order works for me is when I'm with a core group of 'my people' :) and 'their people' meet us out. Then we can all eat, drink, and be merry. But I'm simply no good in the context of going out with a group of surface friends and acquaintences. I never have fun. I don't 'network' well. And for this reason, I'm convinced that I'm kind of socially awkward and would never make it in a corporate setting. Because it's all about networking, and I'm not.

I told you this was a directionless post! hehe...