M. Smith -- 20 June 2007

My success story this year is all about me.  Making it, and coming out not clean but whole on the other side. 

I imagine the biggest success that most of us had this year, honestly, was simply making it through.  Waking up every day and driving to school.  Continuing to try.  Continuing, most of the time, to care.

From the beginning, I felt a slight uncertainty as to my motivation for being here.  I’d be the first to tell you, it wasn’t really about the kids.  Wrong reasons, right?  I didn’t want to be a crazy 28-year-old in a grad school library who’d never paid her own rent, and I wanted to do something worthwhile in the meantime.

Why teacher corps?  Well, it seemed pretty worthwhile.  I met Dr. Mullins on campus and it’s not hard to imagine that that pretty much sealed the deal.  Plus … you get a laptop.

Throughout the year my stance didn’t change.  I was never the teacher who got the horrifying stories after school.  I didn’t learn all that much about my students’ personal lives.  I was, in fact, the one who fled every possible teacher corps gathering at which school was going to be the main topic of discussion.  I couldn’t handle the focus on the students, all the time.  The retelling of little anecdotes you knew you’d all heard before.  I could never stomach the seemingly debilitating practice of letting them take over my down time as well.  I stayed at school until five, six, nine.  The last thing I wanted to do when I got off was get two for one margaritas and talk about … you guessed it … my kids.

When I came back from Christmas break I saw one of my students in the hallway and had to think for a second before I remembered her name.  I’ll admit I was kind of thrilled.  I didn’t miss them, never thought about them individually.  I still don’t.

This sounds horrible, and callous, and believe me coming into teacher corps every other weekend and talking to my peers and hearing constantly that it’s all about the kids … catch them one at a time … teach them ALL to read … don’t let them slip through the cracks … I wondered sometimes if I was going about it all wrong.

The thing is, I couldn’t have done it any other way.  And here’s the deal: I did my best.  I took copious notes in summer school, I did any and everything Elizabeth Savage, Ann Monroe, and Jake told me to do (well, okay, maybe not everything Jake said …).  I got an outstanding evaluation the second month of school, I had excellent classroom management, and I’ll guarantee you I got as little sleep as the next guy.  I made the three AM wal-mart trips to get gold stars because they had to be on every A+ paper, because I didn’t have a cookie pan and I’d promised my kids homemade sweets, because I never had it all together.  I tried to make interesting lessons, I showed up every day (nearly) to show them what it means to be responsible.  I started an after-school tutoring club, I helped my kids and some 1^st graders next door see every Monday and Wednesday afternoon that I think that reading is a critical skill and important enough to spend my time on.  I brought in my own books.  The point is, I cared that I did well by my kids.  And I didn’t, always.  But I tried. 

I just didn’t get personally invested in their lives.

Good or bad, it’s how it had to be.  I started jiu-jitsu the week before I started teaching and became religious about it by the first week of school.  My dojo offers classes 6 times a week and I often attended 4 or 5.  Five-thirty to nine, I took every class they offered, learned what I could, and burned off a hell of a lot of energy.  The day I cried because I realized the kind of world my kids live in, I went to class.  The day Reggie Barnes told me I was captivating, I went to class.  And every day in between.

This kept me sane.  If I get too involved, too attached, too upset, I become ineffective.  If I focus all my resources on one thing and still fail, as we all inevitably do, I give up.  I’m not the best martial arts student ever, and while I got close to a lot of the guys I work out with they sometimes had bad days and ignored me or pointed out all the skills I was lacking and forgot to tell me I was doing anything right.  If I hadn’t been absolutely bound to go home and write lesson plans, the criticisms might have really gotten under my skin.  With the situation as it was, I had to let it go, put it in perspective, and walk in the next night anyway.   It works backwards, too.  If I had gone home on the days when I was unsuccessful at my job and had I dwelt on how I failed, I would have been incapable of moving forward.  But I didn’t go home and dwell.  I worked out, I abused my body to keep a hold on my mind, call it what you will.  I DID SOMETHING ELSE and it made me healthier, saner, and more ready and able to face my students every single day.

Yes, it took time away from teaching, and sure, you can question my motivation or my methods.  But I would not have come out of this year without it.