A silver lining in my cloud

So, despite all the concern this week over my performance and what the administration thinks of me, I received an encouraging note from a parent that lifted my spirits a little. His daughter will be out 3 days next week, and the parent wrote on Tuesday requesting her make-up work for Mon – Weds. (Monday’s work? I didn’t even have the rest of this week planned out yet!) Anyhoo… the dad said that my class is his daughter’s favorite class (woohoo!), and he thanked me for capturing her interest. She is, seemingly, an incredibly engaged student, which is refreshing.

5^th period has been a bit more manageable this week, but I think it’s partly due to the fact that my room feels like a sauna in the morning, so by the end of the day, it’s miserable and the kids are too hot to misbehave too much. I’m really afraid that fuzzy things might start growing in there soon (too bad we’re not on the Fungi unit yet). The battle is now migrating toward 2^nd period. I sometimes feel as if I’m trying to balance an incredibly delicate object, and if I shift too far in any direction, the entire thing will topple, with no hopes of reassembly into any recognizable form. I know that’s probably a bit dramatic, but finding the right mixture of discipline/structure and student choice/expression is a tricky issue. It seems to change from day to day, class period to class period, student to student . . . and yet, some semblance of consistency must pervade the entire arena at all times. I can honestly say that my job is never boring or doesn’t challenge me.

Teaching is also a lot like acting, and not simply because you are always in front of an audience. There are days when I literally have to stuff my impatience and talk sweetly when I want to be sarcastic, and I feel completely fake. Then there was the day when I had to fight back tears during a parent conference, because no 13-year-old should have to face what this child has encountered thus far in her life. There are times when I wish I could use my teacher voice on a colleague and say, “Please stop talking,” so that I can use the Xerox machine or set up a demo before my next class. And there are times when I just want to run offstage and send out an understudy to finish my lesson for the day, but of course that’s not exactly an option. I am thankful for the times when I have felt completely alive as a teacher, and have known that my students are attentive & focused, not on me, but on learning and comprehending and analyzing and evaluating and all the other Blooms-y type verbs.

Tomorrow will be a long day. Our team of kids is coming back to school tomorrow night for games, pizza, & movies. As tired as I know I will be, I’m hopeful that the benefits of spending time w/our kids outside of class will have an immediate and positive effect inside the classroom. They really are amazing kids, and I hope they believe the truth of that statement by the end of the year if they haven’t realized it already. As hard as this job is, it’s humbling to think about the privilege of getting to know these kids for an entire year, watching them grow up and trying to help them along the way. As one of my colleagues told me, “By the end of the year, you’ll feel as if you’ve birthed 110 children.” Ouch. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry at that one, but I imagine I’ll soon discover exactly what she meant.