I had already given up on being the superstar teacher I planned to be. That happened in the fall, when the class started getting worse, and I decided the best thing to do was quit. Now I had been job searching for two months, and my hope of escape was causing more anxiety instead of alleviating it. I had to accept that I wasn’t escaping; I had to accept that a new teaching method would not make my class any better; I had to accept where I was and what I had to do. I was in that classroom until June, and there was nothing to get me out of it. I finally stopped trying to avoid the pain, and I decided to live with it. I accepted that I was stressed and that it might never get any better. To make it to June I could either be a zombie or a teacher. As a zombie, I could give up completely, still coming in every day, but I would bring in movies, let the kids do what they wanted, and take them outside when it got to be too much. I could show up late, leave early, “forget” about cafeteria and recess duty, and I could stop planning completely. Or I could teach. But I had been trying to teach for a year and a half now, so why keep trying when I knew there was no point?
The importance was in the “why.” In October, I thought I had to take back the class to make my life easier. If I could get the kids under control, then I wouldn’t be so stressed, and life would get better. But now I knew that my attempts weren’t helping anything; my life was only getting more difficult. I also expected a few pick-me-ups along the way like “Wow, you are really trying hard, keep up the battle and they’ll turn around soon.” But now, despite my efforts, it seemed like most staff had stopped talking to me completely. There was a huge problem with relying on future improvement and positive reinforcement as motivation for teaching; it was contingent upon victory, and when victory didn’t come, then the only thing left was defeat. I was already consumed by failure, so much so that I thought the only solution was to escape it by any means. My failed classroom directly made me a failed teacher, which directly made me a failed person, or so I thought. I needed to separate my class’s performance from my worth as a person in order to see things a little more clearly.
To teach right, I had to stop caring about what others thought about me. When an administrator walked in the class when everyone was doing their work, I expected them say something like, “I’m glad to see them so focused on their work.” But when I got nothing, I turned to Ms. James, “Why don’t they say anything?” She responded, “It doesn’t matter what other people think when you know what you’re doing is right.” I could only teach, and teaching was the right thing to do no matter how others had judged me. I knew that failure was a reality, but I had let failure be defined by others. If I taught, then I could neither be a failure nor a success, just a teacher, and there was nothing wrong in that. I also knew that if I became the zombie and gave up on the kids, then I would walk away in June - maybe with a broken will, but I would still walk. For the kids, a failed teacher meant a lost year, maybe the beginning of many lost years, and maybe the lost chance to make it out of Candler Park. They deserved a teacher, not a zombie. I decided to just give up on the escape, not the class. It was time to do the job, and let people say what they wanted to say.
No comments:
Post a Comment