And the lowlights

Posts like this will not help me get motivational speaking gigs.

Anyway, with all but one of my final exams out of the way and everything off the walls and things being packed into boxes, I've been doing the usual thinking about how the year went. I feel like it was "off" in some way. Yeah, there were highlights and those were good, but generally I'm leaving this, my third year, feeling that I don't have much "prowess" as a teacher.

Then again, are you supposed to? Well, I guess you're supposed to have enough to acquire continuing contract/tenured status but then again you should assume you're going to mess things up at least once or twice (usually, btw, this happens in a Murphy's Law sort of fashion--the one time you screw things up it involves a parent who doesn't realize that a teacher's being fallible is a strength and not a weakness). And even though I came into this profession as a career switcher and therefore had a little more perspective than your typical starry-eyed college grad, I still understand why the attrition rate for rookie-level teachers is so high.

I taught four different courses this year: Journalism I (an intro course), Newspaper Production, Yearbook Production, and English 11 Inclusion. Each of them had moments wherein I was ready to come to school armed and start picking people off one by one. And while part of it is only so much under my control--we can market all we want but when you see that the percentage of the school's population that buys a yearbook is about the same that participates in activities and sports, then you understand how uphill this can be--part of it definitely is.

I made what is quite possibly the dumbest mistake of my career this year; I overestimated how smart my students were. No, seriously. In both Journalism I and inclusion English (I knew how smart my yearbook and newspaper staffs were because most of them were returning students), I assumed that most of the students in those classes had a certain amount of basic knowledge that would allow them to a) comprehend things at or near grade-level; b) comprehend a set of directions; and c) have basic control of their bowels.

Two out of three ain't bad.

First, the at or near grade-level thing. I'd understood the nature of inclusion--about half the class is regular-level English students and half of the class is comprised of students with accommodations, most of which are watched over by your inclusion teacher (who the special ed department took great pains to drill into our heads was not an intern or gopher). Now maybe I didn't grasp the concept but I had thought that since the inclusion students were given extra support, they would be able to keep up with what's considered a normal-paced English class. It took me a few weeks to figure out that several students were in the class because they were close but not quite remedial. So I had to slow the class down, shift some of the assignments, and eventually completely stopped assigning homework.

Look, I know homework is, like, the root of all evil in the educational system or something but I couldn't even assign quality homework assignments or reading assignments. We had to read everything together, aloud, in class ... something I always was told was what good teachers DON'T do (well, at least by all those "every way you were taught is wrong" people who haven't seen the business end of a classroom in 20 years) and I found tedious when I was in high school. Compound all this with the fact that I'd taught advanced English the previous year and had to re-invent the wheel again, I had an ENORMOUS chip on my shoulder when it came to inclusion.

On the Journalism I side of things, most of the stuff I did came together pretty well and I was able to teach some pretty cool lessons. But then there were the times I wanted to claw my eyes out because I had to deal with students whose highest achievement in life consisted of being able to turn oxygen into carbon dioxide. A week ago, I had one of my dead-in-the-water students walk into my room and ask me how to do our current events journal--an assignment that was not only due May 19 but that we'd been doing all year. Back in March when I was having students record their narrations for our photojournalism movie (another entry to come on that), I spent half my time telling the other students in the class to shut up. In fact, one was so loud that she could be clearly heard on another student's recording. Oh, and she wondered why I knocked points off of her grade for it.

And you know what's funny? The biggest problem here, in all of this, was clearly me. And I don't mean that sarcastically. I mean, I could go on and on about not having enough time int he day and having to buy my own supplies and use all of the nail-myself-to-the-cross language that everyone in this profession uses. But I knew back in November that there was no use in that. I got over myself really quickly when it came to inclusion-level English and approached it from a different perspective--I was teaching reading and writing, not literature. That sounds elementary, my dear Watson, but you'd be surprised at how many teachers--especially young teachers--approach a class like 11th grade English and try to teach it like a survey of American literature course. With journalism, I focused on those who I was getting good discussions and material out of and let the chips fall where they may. That sounds like I left students behind or something and I probably did ... but dumbing down an elective course for those who can't bother paying attention for two seconds? Not my bag, baby.

I had several pain-in-the-ass students this year; however, with the exception of a very small handful whom really stopped showing up or simply slept through the second half of the year, most were nice students who just needed a kick in the ass to get going. I try to look at it not from the "look at the shit I have to put up with" angle, but from the "what can I do next time" angle. Yes, there are instances from this year where I think that I could have done something better or done way much more if only I gave more of a crap (because honestly, there were days where the fact that I had to teach those classes made me violently angry) but I would rather take what I learned for next year than dwell on the load I had to bear this year.