On Wednesday, I made one of my rare trips to Walmart to pick up some materials for class, and what did I see? A rack of DVDs for $4.99. Having nothing better to do, I started flipping through them and although most of them were the sorts of movies that you watch once and then forget about (like Hope Floats and Matrix Revolutions) or that you never bother to watch the first time (like Not Another Teen Movie), but I was compelled to flip through all four shelves on all four sides, even lifting out the front row to see what was behind (they were double-stacked). Why? Because in and among all the hundreds of mediocre movies might be that one gem--that one movie that I've always wanted but never got around to buying, that one that would make my day to find for only five bucks. And what did I find in the inside row of the bottommost shelf on the last corner? That's right--the gem. The movie that provided this quote. The first of the many beautiful pairings of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Glorious.

On a new topic, I feel bad at how my posting has diminished this year. It's not like a I want to quit blogging or anything, but I've felt kind of creatively empty for awhile. I think part of that is because I've been working so hard and because I'm kind of in a sophomore slump. It's my second year of teaching; things aren't as exciting, but I haven't yet gotten into a good rhythm of having all my stuff prepared. And, I don't know, I've been a little down in general, but I don't want to make my blog an outlet for my complaining all the time. And I discovered facebook and found that playing around with applications is a lot less taxing than writing a blog post. So, anyway, sorry about that. I'm going to try to be better about posting. Ooh *She gets struck with a lightning bolt*, here's an idea for you faithful readers who get frustrated with my sluggishness... If several days go by and I haven't posted, try asking me a question or giving me a topic idea in the comments field. Whet the blade a little.

In other news, my little beta fish at school (who happens to be named after the principal) is dying, sadly. He's been dying for, oh, about a week now. Every day, I come to school, look in the bowl, and think aw, he finally kicked the bucket, but then he gives a feeble little kick or I see his little gills moving, so I decide not to flush him for a little while longer. It's kind of gross, though. I wish he'd finally have done with it so I could get a new one. Heartless, I know.

Tonight is the school's annual Lock-In, which teachers are begged by teary-eyed leadership students to chaperone, and yours truly, having neither a daughter's birthday party to throw nor a house to remodel nor a baby to care for, is a prime candidate for chaperoneship. I did draw the line at 1 am, however. There is no plea, no call of duty, no coercion that can possibly persuade me to spend the entire night--awake--with a hundred hyper high schoolers. I would rather get another root canal. I would rather go to sleep with a live spider in the room. I would rather grade a thousand sentence diagrams. Only the most dire academic deadline can bring me to pull an all-nighter, and those of you who know me know that in my mind there is no higher incentive than that. Still, the first five hours shouldn't be too bad. They have lots of activities planned, and kids don't get too psycho until around 3 or 4. If I get too sensory-overloaded, I can always go monitor the movie room--make sure the lights stay on and everybody leaves "a little room for the Holy Spirit," as we used to say at NNU.

Regarding my normal teacherly duties, I've been thinking a lot lately about how to strike the right balance between being a demanding instructor and showing compassion. Or, to explain it another way--how to borrow equally from my dad's philosophy of teaching (give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile) and my mom's (everyone deserves a second chance).

(Incidentally, it's really fun to bring up a certain teaching question in front of both my parents watch them duke it out. It usually goes something like this*: "Hey Mom and Dad, I'm having this problem with this certain student. He's late to class all the time; he always has a note, but I think it's not always legitimate. I just don't know what to do." Mom: "Well, maybe you should sit down with him and tell him you're concerned that he's missing so much class. And you could give everyone a reward right at the beginning of class that he'll miss if he's late every day." Dad: "A reward? For just coming to class on time? No, you should go investigate these notes. Check with the teacher who issued them and give him a detention if they aren't real. And don't let him make up any work he's missed by being late. Make an example of him and all the other kids will think twice about trying anything with you." Me: *chuckling inside*) **

But really, it's hard. Every time I stop to think about it, I really feel like I need to be stricter in my requirements--stop accepting excuses about late work, keep more stringent classroom discipline, not let people leave class for the bathroom so often, require neater work with fewer grammar and spelling mistakes, and so on. There are days when it seems like the whole class is complaining about an quiz or something, and I know, just know, that the ones who are complaining the loudest are the ones who blew off studying. Or there are days when I'm trying to be a good, Nancie-Atwell-type English teacher and have a discussion instead of a worksheet and there's nothing but silence and blank looks, which means most people didn't even do the reading. I know that many of my students don't feel the need to prioritize schoolwork above things like sports and free time. And there's so much they should be learning that we can't ever seem to get to. And here and there are a few students who will someday be like me and think, gee, if only my teachers had been a little tougher, maybe I wouldn't have been so bored in high school. So I grit my teeth and vow to be tougher and require more. But in order to be deaf to whining and BSing, I have to harden my heart a little bit and look at them as a group and not as individuals. In order to teach to the smart, driven ones, I have to let some of the others fall behind. I have to channel some kind of gruff, no-nonsense Oxford professor--maybe Emma Thompson in Wit.

And then I hear about a student who's going through a bunch of hard family conflict, or someone's parent emails me to remind me that their student tries really hard and couldn't I just keep that in mind please, or I look in the eyes of a kid who swears that she really really has to go to the bathroom right now, or I am reminded of what the high school experience is for most people (namely, a compilation of every literalized metaphor on Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and I think, wait, I should be nurturing them too. Their worth is more than their academic abilities, and they have all these various learning styles, and they're slaves to their own limited attention spans, and by golly, they're people and what if I'm dehumanizing them with the stratified power structures of my classroom!

But on the other hand, if you don't detach, then every time you hear yourself roundly abused from behind a bathroom stall door, or every time a student gives you a death look for asking them to please put away their history homework and take out their geometry, or every time you discover that a kid lied to your face and cheated on a test, it's kind of a sharp blow. I feel like I have two unpleasant options: either stop caring because they're just teenagers who don't know any better or show mercy at the cost of being a dupe.

Which is why so many teachers burn out so early. And I don't want to do that. I want to still be excited about teaching in five years, in eight years. I want to be like the woman who taught my first English Education class, who never uttered a negative word about teaching, who showed nothing but eagerness and enthusiasm for every challenge that the classroom offered and talked about her kids as if they were all these untapped barrels of potential, just waiting for the opportunity to become brilliant, diligent, life-long students. She made you want to do wonderful work just to live up to her expectation of you (Remember those all-nighters I mentioned? One of them in college was for her.) She was amazing.

Of course, I've also known her doppleganger--the teacher who always smiles and believes every excuse and is blind to every misdeed in the name of showing confidence in people--her students despise her. I'm not sure that I know how to be the former without eventually becoming the latter. I would say that--so far--this has been my biggest challenge this year.

But, the day-to-day classes carry on, and in the meanwhile there are papers to grade. We're starting Les Mis this week, so I'll leave you with a few quotes from the first chapters:

"There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher."

"...what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon: a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky."

"The two highest functionaries in the state are the nurse and the schoolmaster."
Les Mis



*Purely hypothetical, of course.
**PS. Mom and Dad, I love your advice. Really.

Labels: literature, meta-blogging, movies, teaching

1 comments

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Sonnet to School Dynamics