19 September 2006

Resurfacing

Already five weeks into the school year, I’m facing the last days of the first marking period with joy and some sense of accomplishment. When I think of last year now, I can hardly believe I survived it. I don’t think I could do it again. Knowing what I know now, would make it impossible for me to tolerate the behavior I saw in my class. Maybe it is that knowledge and resolve not to see it any more that has created the positive experience of this year, but I think there’s more to it than that.

There have been big changes at my school this year. A turn over in administration which was at first controversial ultimately forced the staff into making some changes and firmly articulating what we wanted from our new leadership. The roll out of a new school-wide discipline policy that is being followed by all teachers and has the backing of our administration, gives me backbone and the ability to follow through with my classroom consequences (amazingly, none of my students have escalated past the warning stage). Work that the ninth grade team did over the summer and in the first days of school to socialize our ninth graders and also set strict boundaries with them has paid off. The reduction in class size, the restructuring of the ninth grade schedule, and the formation of a solid ninth grade team of teachers have all played into the success I’ve experienced in my class this year.

But there’s more to it. There’s me. I am a different teacher this year. The beautiful part is that I’m the teacher that I was a year ago, the teacher who decided to pursue a teaching credential because I loved teaching. She’s back after a long hiatus of humiliation, self-doubt, depression, and dread. I see the change and resurfacing of the me I used to be every day, and it amazes me. I am easily positive with my students where last year I had to be phony. I am confident in ways that last year I was shaky. I know my boundaries. I know what is not allowed under any circumstance in my room. I know better when to call a student out, and when to quietly continue teaching right next to a squirrely student. This year, when I ask students to do something, they do (and I’m amazed).

Here’s my favorite example this week: On Friday I gave out progress reports. For all students who had a D or an F in my class, I wrote on their report that they were required to come see me after school on Monday. This report went out to their advisor and their parents, plus I verbally told them too. The first gain is that I was able to identify failing students so quickly. I never did anything like this last year because I was so buried under work, so busy just trying to figure out my grading software, so preoccupied with scraping my emotions up off the floor that by the time I passed out progress reports, I had no time to look at the data reported on them. The second gain I’ve experienced in this regard is that only six of my students were failing! Last year, out of sixty-four ninth graders twenty-eight failed my class, (which is part of why I never did much intervention work). The third gain is that of the six students who were failing my class yesterday, five showed up after school. This is miraculous in and of itself because last year I fought a constant battle with students who refused to come after school for detention or other. The fourth gain is that all five students had time to sit with me, look at the grade book and then either find their missing assignments (a matter of one-on-one organizational intervention – something I’m very good at thanks to my OCD) or complete their missing assignments. By time 5:00 rolled around, all of the students who had been failing earlier in the day were now passing!

This is a huge change for me and my teaching, and for my students too. My dear friend and co-ninth grade teacher has been telling me for a year that in your second year of teaching and the years that follow, you have more capacity as a teacher. I had a hard time understanding her and believing her last year, but now I get it. There are certain things about teaching that I don’t have to think about as much anymore, which gives me more mental capacity for gathering data, organizing it, and assessing who needs interventions. I still need to grow. I don’t feel like I’m at the place yet, where I can identify the kind of interventions needed, apart from basic study skills and organizational assistance. However, knowing that my capacity is growing, makes me confident that over time I’ll know how to tackle this dilemma as well.

My mind and heart are full of the things I wrote about last year – the pain in my students’ lives, their rich stories. But my practice is rising to the forefront now. I am less shocked by the news of a students’ parent who has cancer, the brother who has a bullet permanently stuck in his forehead, the student who was born in jail and just finished his first young sentence, the young woman’s journal entry about wanting to die. These things still touch me, but do not immobilize me. They do, however, exhaust me. Only five weeks into the year and I need a day off, a sick day, a vacation. Putting in my 11-12 hours in my classroom each day plus 6-8 hours on Saturday is beginning to weigh me down already, make me heavy, and on my worst days snappy. This year, though, I know when I feel short-tempered it’s usually not because of something the students have done, it’s because of something I haven’t done – that walk to see the sunset, the extra hour of sleep, a whole Saturday to myself. The theme of my mentoring meetings continues to be balance, but there is more to be found this year as the real me resurfaces.