Anatomy of a Monday

In a year or two when I am pursuing another avenue in my life, I will never complain about Mondays. Being a teacher prepares you to expect the unexpected and plan ahead in your mind to know how you will react. Some days, however, are beyond anticipation. Given, not everything happens specifically to me on these crazy days, but they always prompt me to ask myself, "Where am I?"

The tricky thing is that these days totally sneak up on you. 1st period will go all according to plan, and then little by little things fall apart. Today in 2nd period we had a lockdown - not too odd of an occurrence, but it was the first domino in a long line. The lockdown was through the end of the period, so the transition from one class to the next was pretty chaotic. Two of my students never did settle down and got sent to the office for yelling obscenities at each other. Lunch is always crazy, with the occasional condom on the doorknob like today, and 5th period always needs some cool down time at the beginning of the period. But this is my best freshman class, and I can't believe how quickly these kids can go from happy to practically foaming at the lips. Tempers are so short at this school, and almost always, it is because of a joke taken the wrong way. In the same period I had to call a site supervisor to confiscate a phone from a girl that would not hand it over, and then the supervisor proceeded to undermine me and make a fool out of himself in front of the class just because he heard students giggling on his way out. I believe it is totally unnecessary for a grown man to call a class-full of 15 year-olds "sissies." Even after that I had to deal with one of my students that doesn't understand the disrespect that goes along with calling someone a "faggot." By this time in the day I could have accumulated quite the list of name-calling. Even so, this does not compare to the class across the hall, whose door flung open in the middle of 5th period to have a student sprint down the hall away from a furious teacher. I found out later that he was drinking alcohol in class from a Coke bottle. In the end, as per our no-tolerance policy, an ambulance was called, and he had to get on the gurney and take a ride to the hospital to teach him a lesson. Then in 6th period, one of my students stole a consequence referral sheet from my desk and under "reason for sending the student to the office:" she wrote "for being gay" and passed it as a note to another student. And then on top of that, while I was laying on desks in another teacher's classroom seeking therapy, I could hear a fight breaking out in the commons area. At this point in the day, with those kinds of student actions, I usually take a step back in my mind and ask myself, "What am I doing with my life?"

I wish I could say that was it, but then we had to start soccer practice late because the lights weren't turned on, which translates to less sleep for me, and when I finally got home, I checked my email to see this article that my roommate sent me: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/01/31/BA4U1HGRJC.DTL This school is literally next door to our apartment! Instead of feeling unsafe, my instant reaction is that it just figures. Mondays are killer.

January has been a rough one

On the bright side, half the year is gone. But you see the thing about it being halfway is the fact that there is still half yet to go. On the one hand, the final exams went pretty badly, with each class averaging only about a 55%. However, my final exams last year were nowhere near as hard and didn't cover quite as much material. So does this prove progress despite the F average? Am I simply sustaining educational values of rigor and high expectations, or am I doomed to never be satisfied? For this reason I can't wait for the California State Test in the spring - at least so that I will have some semi-official way to measure any and all progress between my first and second year. Maybe then I'll be able to snap out of this job-consumption that I feel myself slipping into.

It's not that I'm slipping into an interest in long-term teaching, but rather that I sometimes think about the fact that my motivations are not always student-driven or educational gap-driven. More and more I'm finding my motivations self-driven in the sense that I want to be the best. Plain and simple. And I'm not just talking about being the best for me. I want to be better than everyone else. Is this a healthy work perspective? Part of me thinks not, simply because wanting to win means that to some extent you are subconsciously hoping for others to lose.

I think it is all because recently I have pretty much convinced myself that I will be teaching for one more year, and the rationale behind the decision involved a lot of self-reflection about what it would mean to me to be satisfied with the job that I had done. I realized that I absolutely hate to leave something before I feel satisfied with its completion - closure, if you will. For instance: I hated giving up playing baseball. To this day, I wish I had not quit. I knew I was still pretty good and in retrospect I hadn't even matured yet. On the other hand, I think it is fair to say that I sucked (and continue to suck) at basketball. Two years were more than enough for me, and it was good riddance when I gave it up. So then in the job world is it only easy to leave a job that was no fun to begin with?

One of the reasons why I vowed to check out new school and job prospects after a third year is that I don't like my inability to draw a line between what is important for me as a person and what is important for me in my job. So then in anticipation of eventually leaving the profession of teaching, I've been long-term goal-setting making expectations for myself that will make me feel like I'm "allowed" to move on to something else. The only concrete one I have right now is that I want this year's test scores to show that I am the most effective math teacher at Richmond High School. On the surface and from the students' and, frankly, TFA's perspective, this is a very noble and attainable goal, but I keep rereading it as if it were accompanied with contempt for and little faith in the rest of the teachers, math anyways. And this, my friends, is why I doubt teaching is long-term for me.

Plus, in my second year I am getting more and more agitated with the sheer number of students learning life lessons by making mistakes. The thing about it is that these kids' timing is so horribly off. In terms of grades and focusing and listening, it's as if they choose to understand the wrong of their ways right at the instant that it is too late to change. Specifically, I couldn't believe how many of my students were appalled to finally understand that with their D or F they received in math, they will not be moving on to the next class. I nearly threw a chair across the room when they yelled, "Well why didn't anyone tell us that?"

And then today. I'm at school on a Saturday helping to run a weekend cram session before the sophomores all take the high school exit exam, and a few of these kids take time out of their weekend to come sit in my class and do nothing. I will tell you though, it is truly awesome to finally be able to tell a student with conviction that if they don't want to be there, they should leave.

Usually the only time I can forget about all that is during second period, when I am just in awe at how chill and composed my precalculus class is. Unfortunately, these days the class is not entirely happy, since only about 60% of them received Cs or above. I'm trying to uphold the idea that a passing grade means you are completely ready for the next level of curriculum, and with so many of them as seniors, I fear for their first math class in college. And yet, these are students that are receiving As and Bs in all their other classes, so I feel as though somehow I'm the asshole here. But to bring it back to my original point, if anyone were the asshole, it would be the math teacher that passed them to my class in the first place. Rule of thumb: if a student cannot graph a line, that student should not be in Precalculus. Or Algebra II. Or Geometry.

January, you suck. Here's to February having three less days.

First impressions of 2011

Things that make it a bad week:

-not being able to sleep the Sunday before school reconvened as if I were a first year teacher again

-planning Precalculus lessons the day-of, every day an hour before school starts

-planning Geometry lessons the day-of, every day during my prep period and at lunch

-horrible soccer practice the day before our soccer game

-losing our soccer game 2-0 after being undefeated

-realizing that I have an ant problem in my classroom when I went to reach for my Coke and it was COVERED in ants

-realizing that the ant problem is because the janitor has not been cleaning my room or trash cans at all this week, and come to think of it, for a while now

-not being able to set aside the time to write this blog entry in complete sentences

Things that make it a good week:

-new shoes

-new soccer cleats

-new mattress pad

-not planning Algebra lessons the day-of

-completing Algebra, Geometry, and Precalculus final exams for next week that all my colleagues want to use

-having our department head speak privately to me about how drastic measures might be taken in the math department next year and I might be able to teach more higher-level math if I stay

-knowing that the halfway mark for the academic year is one week away

-realizing that the soccer loss was a good thing considering that the reason practice sucked so much was that the team was cocky as all hell

All in all, I think it's a toss up.