Today I almost quit. Seriously. I was standing in my classroom, while my adviser and her boss sat in the back, raising my hand in the air and shrieking "show me five" while Ch continued to taunt and whisper to another girl in the class, Ma stood and began to catdaddy (sp? I've never been faced with spelling that before), Cl laughed uproariously at something utterly unrelated to the reading we were supposed to be completing, and Da contentedly drew on his desk with a red marker.
Week 4.
And I was standing there, while chaos ensued, wondering how this happened, what I had done wrong, what I was continuing to do wrong despite my relentless pursuit of the correct teacher behaviors, the best lesson plans, the perfect consequences... and I thought
'I'm done. I'm not giving my kids anything they couldn't get from any other teacher in the Kansas City school system. In fact, I wasn't even that great of a leader in college... really I was good at planning events and being at the right place at the right time. Those things don't fly in the classroom and I've liteally taught a lesson and a half this week, and those were super mediocre despite how much I try to make them engaging and rigorous. I'm tired of failing and tired of being frustrated and tired of being tired.'
I really don't think there was a single time in the day that everyone was sitting in his or her seat. My table points started backfiring today when one group erased all of the points I had on the board while my back was turned. and Ma took my cell phone in hopes of keeping me from calling his mom. Hey achievement gap. I knew you would manifest yourself in the form of low test scores and low self-motivation. I didn't realize you would be so apparent in me... I am as much the achievement gap as my kids are because right now I basically don't understand how to get to their side. It's awful. Today was my breaking point.
Then I went to V's house to help her aunt with some of our homework, so aunt could help V. V ran up to me and hugged me the second I walked in the door. Her aunt offered me a drink or food about 30 times. Tears swam in her eyes while she told me about V's last school with a teacher who called V a crybaby and gave everyone A's while V continued to read below 1st grade level. She looked me in the eyes and said, "my baby prays to be able to do the work at school and to make me and her teachers proud. And I just listen to her and I tell her I'm already proud." We practiced parallelograms and trapezoids and collinear points and I went on my way, with an assignment for V to practice a list of 220 sight words over the next two weeks. V hugged me good-bye and the screen door shut behind me. I walked onto the porch and looked out at a laundromat where a group of men sat out front looking at me (they probably liked my jacket), a liquor store that also sold cigarettes and possibly groceries, and a street with holes and cracks, on the wrong side of Troost. They live less the 5 minutes from my trendy hipster neighborhood, complete with bike riders, a World Market, and PBR billboards (still baffling). But it might as well be a different world.
Tomorrow I will go to school and I will teach for V. and for the other 24 scholars in my class. Because maybe I'm still incompetent and behind the other new teachers and truly just trying to make it from day to day. But I'm the best those kids are gonna get tomorrow and even without the perfect lesson plan or the right number of worksheets or the foolproof management system... I'm the teacher who cares about those kids. Even when they make me furious or devastated. I still believe. Here's to tomorrow.
With love,
Ms. Brown
