Bayou

Bayou

Sunday, August 30, 2015

Everything Is On Fire

It's harvest season in the Delta and with harvest season comes fire. Farmers light fire to fields in controlled burns to clear crop residue and kill weeds before the next planting season rolls around. The fires help nourish the soils and allow for a fresh and healthy start in spring.

The first time I saw a field fire, I found it quite odd. Growing up in a suburban area, smoke was never a good sign, but I've quickly come to realize that down here smoke and fire are just another element of life in the Mississippi Delta (and possibly one reason that the Delta is home to so many asthmatics). Over the last week or so I've probably seen 3 or 4 fires burning everyday along the rural highway as I drive home from work.

Today, driving to the neighboring town, I drove through a cloud of smoke from a fire burning especially close to the road and started to think of my classroom. This week it felt like everything in my classroom and the fields that surround it was on fire.

For the last three weeks, my students have talked while I was talking and played around while they were supposed to be working. What's more, they haven't learned the content they were supposed to have learned by now and that's mostly on me. Everyday I struggle with the feeling that I am running out of resources: Out of paper, out of ink, out of money, out of patience, out of time. Everyday I struggle.

I keep waiting for it to get better, for the day I magically show up and my students respect me and listen intently as I speak and grasp the material that I put in front of them, but that day's not coming unless I do something to bring it about. The truth is my students don't pay attention and struggle with the material mostly because of me. To say my students hold no responsibility for their behavior and their grades would be a lie, but it would be just as facetious to say that I am innocent in all of this. I can do so much better and sometimes I find that I am most upset not because of anything my students do but because of all of the things I know I am failing to do. I know that my classes aren't engaging enough and that I don't scaffold assessments enough so when my students fail quizzes I'm not upset with them for failing at a quiz, I'm upset with myself for failing my students.

To say that I know I'm not doing good enough would be an understatement. I know exactly how much better I need to be, but fortunately I also know that I can be better and I've committed to a plan to ensure it. I'm ditching the lecture-practice problems format for something more challenging and fun for my students. On Thursday, I gave my last lecture and tomorrow I'm going in with a new mindset and a new game plan. We're going to use math centers and project based learning and all sorts of exciting and engaging instructional strategies. Yesterday I wrote my first set of lesson plans based on my new model and for the first time I was excited as I wrote lesson plans. It's the dawn of a new week and I'm so ready for it.

The fires have burned in my classroom for almost a month now and it's time to put them out. The fields of my classroom will be left rich with all the things learned from the fires of past mistakes. Tomorrow is a new day. The fires will end and planting season will arrive.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

121 Reasons to Come Back

My second full week of teaching has shown me quite quickly that almost nothing about this job is easy. If you are looking for a job that is easy, then turn fast and run in the opposite direction of teaching.

Lesson planning is certainly not easy. Attempting to make geometry engaging to high schoolers is probably the hardest thing I've ever done and most of the time I fail (I can tell by the way their eyes glaze over when I start to talk.)

Helping all of the students who need assistance during independent practice is not easy. There are 22 of them and only 1 of me and, despite my best efforts, I have not yet mastered the ability to be in two places at once (I keep trying, though. If there were one skill that could improve my quality of life, this would be it.)

Deciding whether to buy more pencils for the classroom or some desk organizers is not easy. On the one hand, my kids need pencils, but on the other hand if my desk weren't such a mess I might not feel like I was going insane every time I tried to sit down and do work. (Ultimately, I will buy the pencils and wait for my paycheck to organize my desk. My students' needs cannot wait; mine can.)

Getting up at 5:30 am every day is not easy. In the past, getting up in the morning, usually at 8 or 9, was the single hardest part of my day and it remains an immensely challenging part of my life (Of course, getting up is one of the easiest parts of my day, now. It really only gets harder from there.)

Managing a classroom is definitely not easy (SO NOT EASY.)

Laying awake at night thinking about students and trying to figure out how to do better for them is not easy. As I try to fall asleep my mind wanders, inevitably finding it's way to my classroom where it walks up and down the rows of desks, wondering how to make accommodations for this student and how to challenge that student and how to teach all of those students who fall somewhere in between failing and excelling, all in the same class at the same time learning the same material (No wonder I am always tired).

Holding back tears when well-meaning people ask you if you are okay is not easy. "I'm fine. I'm fine" I say, as if the complete exhaustion and stress is not evident in every feature of my face and body. One day I will be fine, even if it's not today. Holding back tears was especially hard this week when it was not a teacher asking me if I was okay but a student. He heard about something that happened earlier in the day and stopped by after school to make sure I was alright. If earlier in the day I had wanted to cry because everything was going wrong, then in that moment I wanted to cry because for one minute everything was going right (Maybe not all the tears are bad.)

There is one thing, though, that is easy. Loving my students is easy. They make me laugh. Why wouldn't I laugh when my student writes that "Geometry is important because when a toddler asks you what shape an object is you can tell them about the angles, too"? They make me cry, sometimes sad tears, sometimes happy tears. They make me question. They make me question where the ball was dropped so that a student who couldn't add or subtract made it to 10th grade geometry and, more importantly, how I can ensure that I'm not the next in line to drop that ball. They make me hope. They are not jaded by the world around them and will not let the outside world tell them what a Mississippi Delta high schooler can and cannot grow up to become.

They make me come back. They make me come back to the most challenging job I've ever had or ever will have. Almost nothing about this job is easy and I come to school and leave school exhausted, but every day I come back. In the face of many challenges and especially in the face of the exhaustion, I sometimes wonder why I come back, but then I remember. I have 121 reasons to come back. They have names.

Saturday, August 15, 2015

Exhaustion: A First Week of School Story

I've completed my first full week of teaching. In the hallways, veteran teachers ask me every day how I am feeling, knowing the answer before I have even opened my mouth: I'm exhausted. I am so exhausted.

They smile and nod sympathetically, but almost never try to assure me that it gets better, easier, less tiring. Maybe it doesn't get easier, I worry. Maybe I'll be this tired for the next two years. Maybe the veteran teachers don't tell me that one day I'll be less tired because they're just as tired after their tenth year as I am after my first week.

Maybe it will always be this exhausting because this isn't just the exhaustion that comes from waking up at 5:30 every day and staying at school until 5:30 every night or from being on your feet for 8 straight hours in shoes that just aren't that comfortable or from spending nights and weekends lesson planning. No, this is something more.

This exhaustion is spiritual. It's physical. It's emotional. And, above all, it's real and visceral and consuming. It hits you when you read a student's response to the prompt "Pick an important number in your life and explain" and written in front of you is the sentence "I picked the number 7 because that is the age I was when my mom died" and then you read sentences like that again and again and again. You are engulfed by it when your student writes frankly that his goal for the year is to get in less fights and almost cries when you talk to him about it. This exhaustion blankets you at night as you toss and turn, wondering how you're going to teach so many students with so few resources. It nearly knocks you over when your students look at statistics on the number of Black students suspended versus the number of White students suspended and say "That sounds like us." It eats you alive when you look at your students and realize they need so much more than a geometry teacher can give.

Certainly, this is not the type of exhaustion that goes away with experience. After a few years a teacher may have stacks of lesson plans ready to go and may have figured out what shoes are actually comfortable and may have even adjusted to the 5:30 am wake-up calls, but time and experience does not dull the senses to the suffering of others. The ache in your heart for the things some of your students deal with will never really go away, so what keeps these veteran teachers going after 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, I wonder?

They must be strong, stronger than most. Maybe it's a touch of insanity. Surely veteran teachers must have an unparalleled sense of purpose to keep at this and keep believing that they are making a difference (they are making a difference, any student will say). Mostly it must be love. It must be the swell in your heart when your most difficult student tells you that you're his favorite teacher and the pride in your chest when the girl in you see something click in your student's eyes as you explain adding negative numbers for the fourth time in two minutes. It must be love.