Three Years Shared

Last night the football team played their home opener against a rival school. Over the last year or so, I've picked up the job of unofficial school photographer and about half of my work occurs on Friday nights. I've found in my photos that the gridiron is a place where all of our truest emotions are on display and this Friday was no different.

I cannot deny that my eyes may have teared up a bit at the sight of my boys walking on the field not as the playful sophomores I met two years ago, but as senior captains who carry the world on their shoulders each Friday night with more grace than most men twice their age. I feel so much pride when I think about these boys and all of my other students, too.

This is the best part of teaching the same students for three years: You fall in love. With every single one of them. I cannot quite verbalize how special it is to be able to work with these same wonderful children every day for three years and to get to watch the young men and women they become. I get to share in such a special time in their lives as they refine their sense of self and set out to explore the world. It fills my work with a meaning I'm not sure I'll ever find again. Over these years, I have given my students a piece of my heart and they have given me pieces of theirs in return.

This, too, is the worst part of teaching the same students for three years: You fall in love. If their victories are my victories, then their heartbreaks are my heartbreaks, too. I play witness to losses of all shapes and sizes and my students' lives have not been short on loss.

It is in those times of loss that the strength of the relationships we have built becomes so clear. Time and time again I have found comfort in my students as they have found comfort in me, even if it is just a hug on the sidelines after a particularly bad defeat. There is such a trust and understanding amongst us that could not have existed after only a year together.

This year, as my students prepare for high school graduation, I find myself also wondering what will come next for me as our district faces consolidation. As we wander together into the still-bleary future, none of us can say what will happen, but I feel blessed to know that with every step I take I will carry these kids in my heart forever.

Bittersweet: The End of Year Two

On Monday I put on the same dress that I wore on my first day of teaching and wore it to watch my first group of students graduate. I've always struggled with graduations. Monday night was as much a celebration as it was a goodbye, a hard goodbye. I think if there is a word for the unique emotion of graduation it must be "bittersweet."

The more I think about it, the more I believe that "bittersweet" might actually be the perfect word for all of this year from day one to day one hundred and eighty. It was a year of incredible loss from the turnover of two thirds of the staff to the loss of a student just months short of his graduation. But it was also a year of incredible joy. My students grew their ACT scores and completed awesome and meaningful projects. I created memories with our ragtag softball team even if we never won a game. I watched the salutatorian address her class eloquently knowing that this girl is going to set the world on fire with her brilliance. I have never been so proud.

I can say with confidence that if I have cried more this year, then I have laughed more, too. I think it comes with the territory. As my relationships with this place and these people have deepened, so too has the emotion that comes with that.

This year was as trying as it was rewarding. Though I was often promised it would be easier than my first year, it wasn't. It was just harder in different ways. In the fall, I started running as a way to do something that was just for me. One day I complained to my younger brother, an avid cyclist, and he shared with me these words that have resonated ever since: "It doesn't get easier; you just get faster." That has become my motto this year. The truth is your second year isn't any easier than your first; you just know what you're doing (sort of). Bad things still happen. Sometimes they are worse than all the things that happened before, but now you have the knowledge to navigate it with a little more grace though never with ease. This work isn't meant to be easy; it's meant to be worth it.

The Hardest Part

You are 21 years old and have just agreed to take a leap of faith and do this thing and teach. You know all too well just how little you know. You are going into this blind even if you are aware of your lack of sight.

At every point in this process, you are going to believe that this must be the hardest part. Passing the Praxis, surviving the first week of school, planning for three preps, balancing teaching and coaching and a life of your own, teaching 150 kids in the poorest corner of the poorest state in the country and finding something to love in each and every one of them. At every point in this process, you will be wrong. None of these tasks is the hardest part.

The hardest part starts the moment you agree to do this and will stay with you years after you leave teaching. It stares you in the mirror every morning when you wake and again at night before you lay your head down to sleep. Nearly two years in, you have not even begun to master it, though, you know it is the only thing that will allow you to survive in this job. Here is the hardest part, the skill no one tells you you must have in order to teach: Forgiveness. You must learn to forgive yourself.

Forgive yourself because you have no idea what to do. You will stumble through lessons on topics you are not quite qualified to teach. You will write a kid up when they don't deserve it and not write them up when they most certainly do. You will realize two days into a unit that you have taught an entire skill wrong. You will write tests that are too hard, too easy, and never quite find the right spot in between. Forgive yourself. You are doing the best that you know how to do.

Forgive yourself because you will make every mistake in the book and then write a few new pages of your own. For most of the first half of the first year, you are going to do more things wrong than you do right. You will regret words as soon as you have said them and more than that you will regret the words you do not say at all. Forgive yourself. You are doing the best that you know how to do.

Forgive yourself because even after you have learned how to do better and be the teacher your students deserve, you will not always be allowed to do it. You will be forced again and again to make decisions that you know are wrong for your students. You are working within a system that is stacked against you and your students. You will give test after test after test and know the whole time that it is wrong. You will postpone learning for the sake of "education" and again you will know that it is wrong. When you can you will fight it, but too often you cannot. Forgive yourself. You are doing the best that you know how to do.

Forgive yourself because your students are slipping through your fingers. You will always be running out of time in the class period, in the marking period, in the year. Your time will run out and you will wonder if they have learned anything at all. Forgive yourself. You are doing the best that you know how to do.

Forgive yourself because even if you are the perfect teacher it will not be enough. You will lose some of your students to all manner of misfortune, to jail, to the streets, to time. Rational expressions and binder grades and performance tasks will not stop a speeding bullet when it comes for one of your students. Forgive yourself. You are doing the best that you know how to do.