High school students at Richmond have a funny way of congratulating first-year teachers on their completion of year one. Most of them begin by asking if you are coming back next year, and when you say yes, they ask you why you are even at Richmond to begin with. It's weird that so many of the students recognize that their community is an undesirable place to be. Their form of congratulations comes when they explain to you the stories about all their past teachers that quit teaching "because of them," and this, I am left to assume, is their way of saying that you were a decent teacher. Lucky for me, a lot of my students spent the year also with a first-year chemistry teacher, who, apparently in my students opinion, made me look like a star. It was actually a little sad to realize that I would not seeing these students for a while, if ever again. It would have been nice to sign some yearbooks or maybe get one of my own, but for some reason the yearbook teacher decided that the entire publication should be in color and no advertisements would be put in, so $70 each was a little expensive for my students. I felt a little bad. You know it's pricey when the teachers won't even buy one for half-off. But oh yeah, I wouldn't buy one anyway after they put my picture alphabetically with the "S" names; this year's new math teacher was apparently named Mr. Brelt Scott. I was also on another page, captioned as Mr. Bredal. Dear God.
I really don't think I have a nice compact piece of advice to throw at the newbie TFA-ers headed to RHS, and for me, there will only be a few - albeit crucial - things that I will do differently next year. First of all, I cannot express how great it is to know what I'm getting myself into now. I know what the students will be like and now I am actually able to anticipate certain behaviors and interactions with the kids. Let's just say that last year in the first week of school, I felt like I had a sticker on my shirt - no, forehead - that said "white, upper-middle class." And come to think of it, I don't remember that first month all too well; it's as if I blacked it out from my memory. I guess stress can do that.
It's a rough feeling at the year's end to not have met TFA's expectations for student academic progress. I originally wrote this as "failing to meet the TFA's Big Goal of 80% student mastery," but I've been trying to avoid using the word 'failure' to describe my students' 55% overall academic mastery from the year. I don't know if the feeling of failure is fueled by my own intensity or rather the intensity of the program, but I learned that for next year I have to do more public in-class praising of the little victories to make the big goal seem feasible for everyone, including myself. I wasn't surprised to have not met the 80% goal, which made me realize that I need to make changes for next year, because if I don't expect it, there's no way in hell my students will give a crap. Plus, amidst this "failure," it's a little hard for me to congratulate my roommate on achieving 89% mastery with his 6th graders. At least it keeps me from being cynical and saying that nobody reaches their goal...
Anyway, the end of school was actually a little anti-climatic, because over the final week, less and less students were showing up to school, until the last day where I literally had a maximum of three students in each class. It reminded me of the catch-22 situation that I've had to deal with all year: My class sizes were ridiculously large this year by any other school district's standards, and in order to have any hope of getting all students in class to learn a concept, I would have to pray for absences... which means actually that not all students would be learning the concept. Plus, if there are too many absences, my students would shut down, finding it unfair that they have to learn a concept even when I'm going to eventually have to reteach the material to everyone else anyway. The kicker though, was the fact that while there were consistently absences in class, there seemed no rhyme or reason to which students would be absent - aside from the usual suspects - meaning that nearly every student had some unique gap in their understandings of the math concepts. Frustrating, I know.
But the last day was still a great day because the select students that actually did show up were pretty much my most well-behaved and favorite students. It's funny though: all the other teachers warned me to not waste my time planning anything for the last day, but I wouldn't have gone to school in high school on the last day either if my teachers did that. Another cycle my school just can't seem to find its way out of.
As it turned out, my students and I just talked while we cleaned the classroom and decided which desks were worth keeping (we tossed 18 of the 37 desks). Most of the conversations were just about what summer plans they have, but first period was different. As any teacher will tell you, your first period of the day shares a very unique relationship with you; as your guinea pigs for each day's lesson, they kind of earn it. Anyway, we had a conversation about marijuana at school, and to keep it in math terms, my students guessed that about 90% of all students at Richmond High had smoked weed before, and 30% had been high at school before. Take that with a grain of salt; I don't know how comfortable they are with percents and I think they were being overly-dramatic anyway. Or else I choose to maintain the shreds of ignorance I have left.
As I think about next year, I am excited to know that I will be teaching a precalculus class, although I have absolutely no idea how I will be teaching it yet. On the one hand, I am super excited to teach a class full of students that should already be somewhat motivated in math, but on the other hand I am crazy to have wanted to teach an entirely new class. In the back of my mind I was anticipating just being able to reuse most of my materials from this year for Geometry and Algebra again, but now I have a third subject to worry about. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I think I'm addicted to stress.
But the big news is that if finances go according to plan at RHS, I will be getting a hanging projector in my room, along with a document camera, which sure beats the ancient overhead transparency projector I've been using. Now I can actually do more interactive things using my computer! Whether or not it's because of events that happened this past year I don't know, but the school is getting some serious work done over summer. We have already installed security cameras just about everywhere on campus (with a high enough resolution to use as evidence in court, which was a major selling point), the parking lot is being redone, and - thank goodness - the heating and air conditioning is getting taken care of. The school was originally built in the decade where it was a brilliant idea to make the school one gigantic room, and the classes, open to each other, were more of "learning communities." When the school learned from this hippie mistake, and the walls were put up to divide the huge room into smaller classrooms, some rooms got the hot air ducts and some got the cold air ducts. At least that's how I legitimize the situation. All I know is that my room was an ice box all year, and across the hall the social studies teacher had sweat stains on his shirt every day. So anyway, every class is getting their own unit in their classroom to take up even more space! Woohoo! If they try to put 40 kids in one of my classes again next year I'm going to punch someone.
Oh, and as a bit of humor, on my classroom repair form that we had to turn in, under "windows" I put "I'd like one." Here's to the year being done!
