By lunchtime today, I was feeling fairly discouraged. So were some of my colleagues. Sometimes teenagers can be tough, to put it politely.
This is the time of year when sophomores often start to be awesome. No one told that to my classes, though, and a class I normally love to pieces was decidedly less than awesome. I was all, I DON'T EVEN KNOW YOU. I made an Annoying Adult Speech about their terrible choices and disappointment and other things I'm pretty sure they 100% ignored, and then sent them to lunch. Piss off.
To be blunt: sometimes teenagers are asses.
Most of the time, I can weather this with relatively good humor. I can manage not to take it personally, because I know it's really not about me. It also helps to remember that I could be a perfect ass myself when I was a teenager. Most (all?) of us were asses at some point, to a teacher or to a parent or both, probably daily. But sometimes it's just exhausting, and teachers are human beings who often feel more like punching bags. (I thought of some more interesting metaphors, but I got a little carried away, so...I'll just leave it there.)
I ate my lunch, which was at least delicious because my cauliflower enchiladas are even better the next day -- at least there was that. At least I had time to eat lunch today. Trust me when I say that this matters. (And a huge shout-out to the colleague who covered my last class of the day for 15 minutes the other day so I could finally wolf down leftover soup while returning a phone call from an administrator at a different school who had questions about the MYP program.) Right now we are operating on one functioning stall in the faculty bathroom, our entire school is out of paper, and even if we had paper it wouldn't matter because all the damn copiers are always broken. ("Let it be a challenge to you." --Up the Down Staircase.) Eating delicious leftover cauliflower enchiladas was basically the highlight of my entire day.
Until!
Until eighth period.
Eighth period has been rough for me this year. It's a class I could normally teach in my sleep, but this year's kids have blown that complacency to smithereens. I have shed actual tears over this class, once just on the other side of the door. I've felt that I don't know how to reach them, or how to motivate them. My usual expectations have been met with confusion, or apathy, or a level of defeat I'm not used to seeing in a higher level class. I've thrown up my hands and said to the kids, "This isn't working guys. Help. I literally have no idea what to do here." (I think they actually felt sorry for me that day.)
These are not bad kids. These are actually kids I like quite a lot; none of them are terrible to me or anything. But there's something about this class. I don't know what it is; I have felt, on several occasions, that they don't quite trust me and they definitely don't trust themselves, and none of us have been quite able to find our groove. This is something I'm better able to handle early in the year. By second semester, I pretty much sound like a deranged person every time I talk to them because THIS IS A HIGHER LEVEL IB CLASS AND WE HAVE SHIT TO DO, PEOPLE.
Anyway, I took Friday off because I was busy turning 37 and I decided that I would practice radical self-care that day by NOT sitting in the middle of the sophomore section during an assembly and I would take my sweet time eating lunch that someone else made, and I would drink wine with that, thank you very much. In my absence, I left a letter to be distributed to each one of my juniors. I begged them--really, literally begged them--to prepare for today's discussion on the novel we've been reading. I begged them to do work. DO SOME WORK. ANY. JUST A LITTLE. FOR MY BIRTHDAY. Yes, I went there, because I am not above emotional manipulation. Basically my letter begged them not to suck. It was the letter of a crazy person. For good measure, I e-mailed the entire class yesterday afternoon. I do not think I sounded any more sane.
When class started this afternoon, one of my sweet junior girls danced in (she really does seem to bounce or dance wherever she moves and I cannot look at her without smiling). She hugged me and asked how my birthday was. I had the kids move their desks into a circle for our discussion. I busied myself with a flurry of taking attendance and printing some of the work one or two kids had e-mailed me. And then my sweet junior girl said, "Can I--I have to do a thing before we start, is that okay? Just a really quick thing." She vanished into the computer lab. A moment later she reappeared with a bouquet of flowers, a box of cookies, and a card signed by everyone in the class. And then they all sang "Happy Birthday." I nearly cried. I'm nearly crying now just writing this.
During my first year of teaching I had the most wonderful mentor, someone who can realistically claim a great deal of credit for my survival in this job (that's you, Ron). He told me that students would give me things like this sometimes--little notes of appreciation, or cards, or whatever. And he told me to save them, to put them in a place where I could find them on the hard days, the days when teaching is exhausting, defeating, frustrating, enraging, sad. These are the things, he said, that would remind me why I'm doing this.
This card, from this class, is going straight to the top of the stack. I read the notes later, after the kids had left. I don't even have words.
But even better than that was the class itself. For the first time, I had 100% participation. No one skipped class. No one. Everyone talked. Every. Kid. Participated. One girl e-mailed me last night and said, "If you could...I would really appreciate it if at the beginning of the discussion, if you can put me on the spot first. Because let's face it, I am not the one to speak at these things." So I did. I asked her to start, and she just took off. She spoke several times throughout class and I hugged her ecstatically afterwards. Another girl, who has literally never said a single word during discussion all year long, jumped in without any prompting. Another girl, who actually loves to read quite a lot but had a really rough first semester, was just on fire today. And a boy I've butted heads with for two years (I've written about him here before) was so phenomenal today I felt like I was teaching a different kid. He had his book out, he referenced pages numbers and quotations to support his claims, he didn't look at his damn phone all period, and it was all I could do not to burst into happy tears. I didn't, though, because that kind of thing would probably confuse the poor dears more than my desperate e-mails.
These kids are still working on their written work. Their performance on paper, so to speak. But today represented such a huge shift from the beginning of the year that I'm sailing on nothing but optimism and fierce love for these kids. Are they beginning to trust me? More importantly, are they beginning to trust themselves? Their own voices?
Sometimes teaching them reminds me of taming wild kittens. When I was little, spending lots of time at my family's farm, I spent hours and hours and hours trying to coax feral kittens out from underneath the playhouse in the yard. My mother tied a piece of lunchmeat on a string, and I squatted there until my legs ached, waiting for these kittens to bound out and become my new friends. When that didn't happen immediately, I trudged inside, defeated. When I returned to the yard, the meat, naturally, was gone. I was so indignant. But I persisted, and finally, finally, one kitten came close enough for me to stroke her furry gray neck under the watchful eye of her mama. I never tried to pick her up, because for her, for us, that was enough, and I didn't want to push my luck. Over the years I got better at kitten-taming, and by the time I was Suzannah's age I'd managed to turn a couple of feral kittens into annoyingly attached pets.
I'm not new at teaching, but each year brings new students, and we have to figure it all out together. For some kids, I will celebrate the fact that they feel comfortable speaking aloud to the peers, unprompted. For others, I will catch them in a hug when we have a really great day together. All of them matter. And sometimes I just need them to remind me that I am the lucky one when they get close enough for me to meet them where they're at.
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