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.