Doing Better

Yesterday my kids took a quiz on integer operations, a topic I have never taught in-depth with sixth graders (it's a seventh grade topic).  The quiz wasn't easy, but the vast majority of the kids in both classes performed to the best of their ability, and many of them did 100% of the work correctly and completely.  When I handed back the quizzes today, the responses I got on both ends of the spectrum were exactly what I love to hear.

Can I come up at lunch and get extra problems? -G scored 70%
I can't believe I missed that negative sign! -T scored 90%
I'm getting better at this. -K scored 65%
Do you need help in after school this week? -B scored 100%

I met my goal.  I want to get an 80 next time. -C scored 75%

But there was one reaction that really got to me, more than all the others.  A student who throughout the year has been a challenge for me behaviorally and academically scoffed and shook his head at the thumbs up sign I gave him when I returned his 80% paper.  I gave him a look of confusion to which he replied, "I can do better."  Not so long ago, this student would be thrilled with a D, and sometimes perfectly content with an F on quizzes, tests, classwork, and homework assignments.  No more.  He examined his quiz meticulously and called me back over.

HERE!  This is mistake I shouldn't have made.  I forgot the rule that a negative divided by a negative is a positive.  I must have rushed through that question.

It's easy to blame everything wrong in our lives on external factors.  It's easy to avoid holding ourselves responsible and just blame something - or someone - else.  Does that mean it's hard to own up and step up?  I told him that since he used the same rule correctly on two other questions, he probably did rush through it, but now he'll remember to take his time, even when the question seems basic. He agreed and went back to work on designing story problems for multiplying a positive by a negative.  

Forty minutes later upon giving back the corrected quiz he repeated, "I can do better, Ms. Haskell.  I'm going to do better."  

Is it harder to solve a problem than it is to complain about it? Is it more difficult to maintain faith and resolve than it is to give up and despair?  My experience tells me that the good and bad options require the same amount of emotional energy, but one side of the coin leaves you inspired and hopeful while the other simply sucks the life out of you.  So is it hard to own up and step up?  No.  My kids can do it, and so will I.  I will be better too. 

The Reframe

Everyone has bad days at work, and lately I have had what I consider to be a disproportionate number of them.  The honeymoon period of the first months of school is over and I am unspririsingly entering the super-self-critical stage of the year.  It's freaking crunch time and there is too much to be done for me to waste my emotional energy on anything but the kids.

I have come to realize that the recent bad days have been merely a matter of maladjusted perspective.  My kids are awesome.  I should not care about anything else.  Yesterday I let a bad afternoon ruin my entire day, but nothing should have been able to discount the fact that earlier in the day my kids got their highest class averages yet on an exam, and that I had a significant number of kids master every standard I tested them on, including one girl who told me during advisory that this year so far has made her "love math so much."  I've reworked my mindset and I'm ready to let go of the nonsense.  I do love my job 99% of the time, and the 1% can pretty much just go to hell.

The Matthew Effect

I don't understand how people can seriously believe that the Bible is a literal and completely unembellished account in every word, phrase, and tale.  There are several parts of the Bible that I think many modern day people should find severely disturbing.  The story of God telling Abraham to bring Isaac up the mountain to burn him, for example, is just incredibly dark and upsetting to me.  I have always chosen to take it as a highly-elaborated fable rather than a fully accurate narrative.  If that makes me a blasphemer, I really don't care; I can't get down with the idea of God telling his favorite man to go kill his own son, or the idea of that man being so ready to do it without so much as brief explanation.  It's one thing for the stories to show this ruthlessness in ordinary people, but the way God tests Abraham like a crazed and jealous girlfriend, and the way Abraham so thoughtlessly obeys, is chilling.  So, I go with the idea that it's a little fictionalized, meant to teach readers about the enduring powers of faith and mercy.

There's one other passage that sticks with me, long after I stopped actually reading the Bible at all.  This one is from the new testament, and is about a group of slaves whose master splits up his "talents" which I can only assume means his money, among the group of them.  Everyone knows the part that basically says the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but the context of that really famous line (the one who has will be given more, but the one who has little will wind up with nothing; I'm paraphrasing) make that particular sentiment even more uncool.  The parable says that the master splits up the money based on each of the slaves' potential to perform.  The two who are given more money (more talents?) are able to turn a 100% profit, or close to it.  The other slave who only got "one talent" goes off and buries it in the ground.  When he tries to explain himself, he tells his master that since he knows the boss does zero work and just basically makes money off of other people's labors, he shouldn't really make a profit at all.  A pretty logical and ballsy argument if you ask me, but of course, he gets berated and called a lazy idiot or something of the like.  Then it's written in the supposed words of God (isn't that what people call the Bible, the direct words?) that if you aren't naturally the smartest, richest, or most adept person, you're essentially screwed and won't be able to make anything of yourself or your circumstances.  Do people really think that is what God, the being who allegedly made everything out of nothing, would say?

Instead of advising toward the complete disownment of people who aren't as talented, rich, or adept as you'd like (read: it actually advises that you throw such useless humans out to weeping and gnashing of teeth), the next verse should have read, "so if you're one to whom little's been given, it's going to be a long road; don't bury opportunities, but dig them up instead, and work like a dog to do it."  I remember listening to the priest do this gospel reading when I was a teenager and thinking, "hey Catholic powers-that-be, why in the hell would you choose to have us hear THAT?"

Something can be made out of nothing, and no text on Earth, sacred or not, is going to convince me otherwise.

Frustration

I have profound and fundamental issues with skating by.  You know, the process by which a person follows just enough of the rules, does just enough of the work, and acts like just enough of a decent human being to pass as whatever they are supposed to be or at whatever they are supposed to do.  Maybe it's because I was guilty of this lazy tendency for my first 17 or so years of life, or maybe it's because I now spend mountains of energy and time trying to drill the propensity out of students.  With the kids it can get tiring, but it doesn't really bother me much.  They are children, and they are growing.  Like me and many, many Americans out there, they will learn and they'll get it together.  With adults, however, it truly grates on my nerves - the idea that it is anywhere near acceptable or forgivable to do the bare minimum.  I would think that at least some of the time a grown person would want to exert a bit more effort than would be required in order to just graze the bottom of the bar.  Maybe try exceeding the expectations once in a while rather than perpetually falling an inch and a half short (far enough to get super irritating, yet not far enough to warrant the time it would take someone to address).  This kind of behavior is maddening and a slap in the face to the rest of us, but what's even more insolent is the fact that people who skate by actually think they are slick about it.  They think they have gotten one over on those around them.  Meanwhile, it's glaringly obvious from a mile and a half away.  Grow up and step up, or for God's sake stop putting on a show.  If you plan to skate by, at least have the nerve to do it with some dignity and stop pretending that you are anything more than just (barley) enough.

Snow

Am I crazy or is winter especially unbearable this year?  I feel like the one snow storm a week phenomenon did not come to the city last year.   Every time it come down, it is just enough to be really annoying and moderately dangerous (sliding everywhere on the road, having to dig the car out every 6-8 days, the streets never getting cleaned, or fully plowed, etc, etc).  What's worse, it's always just under the required amount for Mr. Michael Bloomberg to cancel school.  This man just tells the city not to drive, but then keeps school open, when hundreds of teachers live in Long Island, New Jersey and Westchester.  I live here in Brooklyn, so I could leave my car plowed in and take mass transit, as suggested by our dear leader, but do I want to spend 1.5 hours fearing certain death on a bus driven by someone else, or 30 minutes in my own car with my life in my own hands?  The latter please.  Sometimes I miss the old Garrison days when our Principal/Superintendent lived far away and would shut us down for mild flurries.

Don't misunderstand; I love my job.  I want to be at school every day.  I want to teach.  I want to see my kids.  What I don't want is to almost die on the way to work, only to find ten students sitting in my homeroom, and maybe 120 in the school at large.  I mean, really, what am I supposed to do with ten children?!  I can't do anything new, can't do what I had planned, so I have to review and make new plans, make new worksheets, make new activities, or else assign dreadful busy work worthy of a sub.  Not this time.  I have contingencies this time.  Plan A; school is open and the majority of my kiddos braves the snow, in which case we work on area of trapezoids and triangles, or B; my half-class and I play math games in rotating centers and finish our Donors Choose thank you letters.  A wasted day, un-wasted.  Plan C, the little known engine that probably won't, is in case of a miracle: sit in PJs, snuggle Lola, plan, catch up on back issues of the New Yorker.  Oh, to dream.

The way I see it...

When you love your job, you love your life.  Ten years ago if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I probably would change my answer every couple of hours, or simply say, "no clue."  I'm amazed daily by how happy I am at work, and how much better I can cope with craziness than I could two years ago.  How does someone like me, with great academic promise but little direction, find their vocation immediately after finishing college?  No clue.

Here's the scary part though; I realize that I will probably never feel like a great teacher, and that I will fail on a daily basis as long as I remain in the profession.  I also realize that it's actually this exact sentiment that's one component of good teaching, but I'm not the type to be able to sustain it for an entire career.  I'm not that resilient (and quite frankly I don't think many people are that resilient...hence the surplus of bad teachers who are allowed to slip by in their laziness or lack of work ethic).  Ten more years I can probably do...and try to do well.  But twenty or thirty or, holy cannoli, forty...no way.  The whole career change thing, years in the future though it may be, is daunting.

I frequently refer to teaching as my vocation, rather than my profession, because it feels like the only thing I can even consider doing right now.  I can only hope that when the time comes to put down the chalk, I'll find something else to love.  Because really...when you love your job, you can't help but love your life.