I'm the most textbook visual learner you could ever have. I love graphic organizers, I'm anal-retentive about organization, I like for everything to be neat, and calm, and quiet. But somewhere along the way I must have picked up some sort of auditory memory. Maybe it's all those years of music lessons.
For the first time in a long time it was quiet in my room after school today. No tutorials, no detention. I closed the door and graded the tests I knew were inevitably failures. I could still hear rhythms in my head. Echoes of things kids said in my classroom today. Like ghosts in the room with me at 3:45 I could still hear the cadence of voices in my head. Stupid comments, occasionally obscene, vulgar, or just inappropriate floated through me head. It's something about the way they talk. Like there's a pattern already laid out, and they just substitute this name or that one. The same words day after day, arranged differently...not really saying much.
It was the first time I've had a moment to even think about them since Christmas. It's amazing how you can be in the same room with children for 8 hours a day and never really think about them. You think about the behavior, the consequences, the rewards, the lesson plan that's due, the copies you need to make, the time, the bell, and a million other trivial tidbits...but it's not until they leave that you really start to think about them. I think that's the hardest part of being a teacher. Having 10 million things to do for tomorrow, and 25 children that need you right now.
First semester, I lived in the moment. I knew everything that had happened, was happening, may happen...I knew exactly what they needed (as best any one person ever could), I adjusted, I discovered, I invented. Since Christmas, I've become much less present. I want to have 2 weeks of lesson plans, I want to have copies made ahead of time, I want to walk out the door of the school and not think about work until the next morning. It's made me a worse teacher (which became blatantly obvious as I watched them fail my test one after the other), but a more stable human being. Is it possible to do this job well and not let it consume every waking hour?
We laugh because E.W. and I went to see Freedom Writers. Apparently you actually can make a difference, but it requires working 3 jobs, alienating your husband to the point of divorce, and only teaching one class a day (why do they only have one class in these movies??). At what point do you start to live a life outside of education, without becoming the "worksheet teacher"? 10 weeks into first semester I was burnt out to point where I seriously considered driving off into the sunset many afternoons. I can't live like that. But even when they're not in the room, their echoes still haunt me and seem to ask, "Why weren't you paying attention? Why didn't you notice?"........It may be that I care too much to actually do this job long-term. I think in the end, it might consume me.
1 comment:
"But somewhere along the way I must have picked up some sort of auditory memory. Maybe it's all those years of music lessons."
Or maybe the division of people into discrete "learning types" is itself an ed. school fad that may sometimes be helpful to keep teachers on their toes but which does not describe reality.
Your post is compelling and provocative. A year further in, I still think your suspicion is correct: doing this job here the way I want forever is impossible, and doing it forever would require doing it a way I don't believe in, or doing it in a very different place. That different place must conceive of education and the job of the teacher in a very different way, and places like this need to figure that out or education will never exist here.
Post a Comment