The Gamut

Every day in this job runs the gamut of emotions and feelings of efficacy. I'll give you glimpses of a few.

Monday I took my final test that I needed to transfer my teaching license to Tennessee for next year. On the way home, I started to get overwhelmed. It wasn't a necessarily emotional response, and it's really hard to describe. In my tutoring with my students, I feel fairly confident in my ability to convey information and teach them. But a combination of observation, critique, and looking at data began to make me insecure. Because, you see, a lot of my students haven't improved on their tests. Haven't gotten better at reading according to data-collecting assessments. Haven't improved their attendance or their behavior. On my drive home from my test, these thoughts were circling in my head, and I started to consider: most of my teammates are doing this job for one or two years. They are also struggling with feelings of inadequacy and looking at the seemingly insurmountable problem of unequal education, but to them it is an episode in their lives. For me, I'm signing on for 30+ years of this. That's when I panicked. I felt like I wasn't good enough, that these students have such hard lives and it JUST ISN'T FAIR. How could I be a good teacher if I couldn't even manage tutoring effectively? I don't want to end up like a lot of my classmates: teaching because it's a job and it makes money and you get summers off. Nothing sounds worse to me than that. 

So I called the City Year Corps Member hotline. Yep, City Year has free counselors on call all the time to talk corps members through issues. Because we spend a lot of time in a lot of hard situations. We're often more emotionally close to our students than other school employees, which is dangerous because these kids have scarring experiences. Just for an example, my student was absent the first 3 days of this week and returned today. I celebrated his return and asked what had kept him away. His brother passed away, he said. He was 15. I didn't ask what happened. So anyway, I called this hotline and talked to a counselor about my insecurities and my worries that I'll burn out and want to quit my avocation. It actually helped a lot! I realized a lot of my insecurity was just stemming from my propensity to hold myself to unattainable standards and feel like I need to be better than everyone else because I'm the only tutor with an education background. So I'm gonna stop that, I think. Obviously I'm still going to do my best, but I need to try harder and be more intentional about celebrating my strengths while trying to being even stronger!

So that happened. I would say that was definitely the nadir of my week. It got better from there. 

Blossom received more answers to his questions courtesy of my good engineering buddy at Purdue. He's working on a second set of follow-up questions. He was also early to school every day this week.

Romeo, which I'll call the basketball-fanatical student who is a reluctant reader, is still totally digging The Lightning Thief, and he is already excited about reading the sequel. 

I got to laugh and play with my students while learning words they chose from Lightning Thief as words they didn't know. We played 'trashketball' while discussing meanings and parts of speech of words such as 'vital', 'kleptomaniac', 'solstice', 'frustrated', and 'obnoxious'. Lots of fun was had.

Today, a student arrived at school at his usual early time and walked straight up to me with a bag in his hand. He handed it to me and said, "Miss! Look!" I unwrapped it to find a GIANT chocolate-covered strawberry. "Wow!" I said, "Who are you going to give this to?"

"You!" he said. :)

Over half of my students improved their reading level over the first half of the year. 

My teacher is excellent. She works really hard and cares deeply about the success of our students. She gets frustrated with their behavior, but for all the right reasons. She wants to find a way to structure the class that will help them improve themselves. 

A student threw away the Valentine's treat I gave all of my behavior lunch students. It wasn't a statement throw away with pageantry or flamboyance, but the throw away of genuine apathy. That really hurt.

I'm telling you, every day is like this. There are a million things that make me want to cry. Half a million make me want to cry of sadness and despair, half a million want to make me cry with joy and fulfillment.

I think I'm definitely hooked on this profession. I will definitely need the support of all my best people to stay in one emotional peace, but I can't imagine giving up now that I know every thing that I can do and how many students need someone to care about them. That's it for me. I'm a goner. 

My little cup of joy has overflown!

So, this week is a relatively long week for us at school because we are there for all 5 days. We usually are in our school for 4 days with training on Fridays. I was really kind of thankful to get these 5 days, because that meant that I would get a lot of quality tutoring done with my students.

One of my students has been a prominent feature in my week for sure. You see, we have these stories in City Year that act as "founding stories" meaning that they form the core of what we're about. One is about starfishes. I think I posted it on here before, but the gist is that even if you only make an impact on one student, it's worth it. So, we talk about our "starfish" students a lot in City Year, referring to those students who we feel we are really making a difference for. Last week and this week, we've been asked to share our Starfish Stories with the staff at City Year San Antonio. So I wrote about a student I'll call Blossom (for the name of his family dog, a very nice pit bull). Here is what I wrote:

Blossom is tall for his age and is very proud of his dark shoulder-length hair, which he wears across his eyes and flips frequently to get out of his face. He lives with an ever-changing variety of family members, but his 20-year-old brother is the most constant presence at Blossom's extracurricular activities which include Mariachi band. Blossom wears the same outfit to school every day and doesn't own a weatherproof jacket.

When I met Blossom, he asked me what City Year was about. I told him that we help students in class and put on fun activities after school. He said, "Miss, that sounds stupid. I hate City Year." Blossom made it clear that he did not like school or see the value in receiving an education, and he was frequently absent and referred to the office for behavior issues. He mentioned to me that he wanted to drop out as soon as he was able to. Because he was so far behind, I was assigned to work with Blossom in attendance coaching, behavior coaching, and Language Arts tutoring. 

What really helped Blossom get back on track was small, reachable incentives. He would often come to class without any materials whatsoever, so after I lent him a pencil, I challenged him to earn that pencil by staying on task during the entire class period. He quickly took the challenge and earned his pencil. The next incentive was to keep that same pencil over night to show me that he could be responsible with his materials. When he accomplished that, he earned a pen. We used these small steps to build up to the point where now, Blossom has an incentive chart with 25 spots on it. When he makes it to school on time and participates in class 25 days, he will earn his largest incentive yet: playing basketball during tutoring time with his best friend. 

​I am so proud of how far Blossom has come since I met him in August. We have often discussed his view that school did not matter to his future. Eventually, he divulged that he was interested in engineering. This was extremely exciting for me because my brother and my father are professional engineers. I told Blossom that he could write questions that he had about engineering and I would ask my family members and report back to him. He wrote 10 questions without prompting, including, "Do you like being an engineer? Why?" and "Do you make friends in engineering?" I am so excited to share with him what they said! 

My biggest wish for Blossom is that I can teach him to achieve for himself and to delight in the simple joy of giving his best effort. If he can find the motivation and determination to learn, nothing can stop him from achieving his goals.

Last week, Blossom was absent the entire week because, he later told me, he didn't feel like coming. He returned this week and we have worked really hard to make sure he caught up in class. After I showed him what Dave and Dad had to say about his questions, he decided to buckle down and make the effort to catch up. I have spent a lot of time with him this week, something that he would have literally turned his back on earlier in the year. I am really excited to see how much he will improve between now and the end of the year; his potential is truly outstanding!

Three weeks ago, I had to chase him down and threaten to sit with him at lunch with his friends around to get him to join me for our behavior coaching group lunch. I am ecstatic to say that today, this happened:

"Miss, will you be here tomorrow? You're not always here on Fridays."
"Yep, we are going to be here!"
"Do you have to eat lunch with anybody tomorrow?"
"Nope, my groups are all on Wednesday and Thursday."
"Would it be okay if me and a friend ate with you?"
"I would like that!"

OF COURSE IT'S OKAY! Is it okay if I dance around the cafeteria deliriously happy?

I almost forgot to add that he also gave me a lesson in Spanish pronunciation while we were revising his personal narrative. He talked about his Tia (aunt in Spanish) and he stopped me every time I said it to correct me. "No, Miss! It's Thii-AH!" "Thii-AH?" "Yes, that's better." :)

AND, I finally got my most stubborn students to be interested in a book. If you remember, this is the same student who refused to consider any book that didn't solely focus on basketball, more specifically, the NBA. Guess what book we're reading together? The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. I am pretty sure basketball isn't even mentioned! (However, sixth graders who don't like school and get in trouble are. Interesting...) We read the first page together and I asked if he would like to continue with this book. "Sure, it's alright I guess" he said with a shrug. One chapter later, he asked if he could borrow it to finish the second chapter at home. I SAID YES. (It's an excellent book for all ages by the way, I highly recommend it and the rest of the Percy Jackson series.)

These are just two of my 20 students. Let me tell you, not all of the others are reacting as positively to me as these guys. This is the first week in a while, though, that I feel like I'm doing my job really well and that I'm making a difference to these students.

I don't think it is possible to overstate how happy/proud/overflowing with joy I am. I'm doing something important!