I want to teach.
More and more I am finding that teaching is becoming a greater challenge. I show up to work exhausted wondering why my students are not learning. Where am I going wrong? How can over half of a class receive Ds and Fs? Where have I failed them?
I question myself over and over. How can I rework this lesson so that my students understand this? What is a better way to teach using textual support to prove your thesis? How can I help my students to better understand the appropriate use of commentary and elaboration? Why are my students sixteen years old and practically illiterate?
Oh. It’s because I haven’t been teaching.
I have been attending professional developments, during the school day. I have been focused on helping my Academy plan out the intervention program. I have been meeting with parents. I have been chasing paperwork around to make sure that my bus is secured for our field trip. I have been making photocopies. I have been checking out books from the library because it is closed during period three. I have been checking and responding to e-mails and various memos.
But I thought I signed up to teach children the foundations of our society and civilization? I thought I signed up to teach kids about the system so that they would have enough knowledge to know how to function within it all while changing it from the inside and out?
No. We signed up for paperwork. We signed up for bureaucracy. We signed up to make copies of our copies so that when the copy gets lost we have just one more to prove that we completed the paperwork. We signed up for “professional development” on teaching strategies that are part of our mandated curriculum anyway. We signed up for a training on the newest edition of the curriculum guides designed by college professors who have not once taught in a low income high school in the inner city.
I have found that this form of venting is possibly the only thing that will keep me in education. Because, in the end, I vent so that I can stay in education. So that I may keep serving the students who I have grown to love so deeply. So that I can cope with the nonsense that sometimes pulls me away from my original goal: to share knowledge. That is why I vent. That is why I write this blog, so that I can continue on my mission, and so that those who teach, and those who do not, are aware of the frustration that teachers face and know exactly how hard teachers work for success in education, even within a system that is greatly failing the majority of its consumers.
I teach.
