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.
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