Backlog, III

Failure Story

The last year (like every year, I suppose) has been full of failures. It has had its successes, too, of course, and even the failures may themselves reveal or allow new and different successes, so this is no miserable admission. Still, as a new teacher in a deeply troubled school district, faced with chaos and with essentially no administrative support, reality demanded constant adjustment of methods and goals, and it presented frequent disappointments.

Maybe the greatest and most obvious failure is evident in the look of the next year: I am not returning to the same school district. I don’t know if that fact alone represents a failure, or if it is rather the result of some failure or of some collection of them; in any case, it has been for me a cause of both sorrow and relief, and however I explain or justify my leaving, it stinks of disappointment.

Enumerating reasons for my decision to leave that district is not a satisfying task. All teachers have hard jobs, and the Mississippi Teacher Corps places teachers where they will have extraordinarily hard jobs. What can I describe that I hadn’t heard about before I came, that I didn’t expect? We all join the Teacher Corps anticipating difficulties, maybe even (somewhat perversely) hoping for them, as we expect them to present novel experiences and formative challenges, even opportunities to do good. What can I describe that I haven’t heard about from other teachers in this program, other teachers who are staying and have stayed in their districts and lived with the difficulties? Is that the failure? Am I complaining too much, and being weaker than so many of my peers?

The principal quit a week before school began. The superintendent didn’t last much longer, getting suspended and then dismissed under suspicious circumstances. The new principal, hired at the last minute, was the most constantly and universally hostile person I have ever known. She battled with the best teachers, compelled some fine students (with some of the school’s most sophisticated parents) to leave for other districts, and screamed constantly at everyone, at students, at teachers. The most problematic students would keep returning to my room, while the ones who had never been in trouble for anything would be suspended for chewing gum. Of course bells rang erratically and I had no access to a copier, making classes last unpredictably 45 or 75 minutes and requiring me to administer tests on an overhead projector or dry-erase board. But I think I could have dealt with these things. I don’t think these things would have made me leave. But the screaming! The constant, terrible hostility! On days when she was off-campus, the lightness was palpable. Everyone was happier.

Should I have stayed? It was widely believed (correctly, it turns out) that she wouldn’t be returning as principal (being promoted to the central office). It might have gotten better. Over the summer I saw students in town, chatted with them on the street or in the grocery store. I sometimes felt in those moments that I should have stayed, and that leaving was failure. I am going to another school that serves many poor students, but it has a significantly more competent administration, an administration that is not hostile; and I am going where I have friends (I was alone in the previous community, and very lonely). I felt like my presence, my mere presence, may have been beneficial to many of my students, and I feel bad to leave them. I felt like most of whatever benefit they took from me was despite their being in school and not because of it. I wish I could have had more failures with them, and through failures maybe some greater degree of success, but I felt thwarted by the circumstances. I hated getting up to go back every morning.

I am trying to keep in contact with some of my students, and I am going where there are similar students but better circumstances. My whole experience in that school is stained by failure, but I expect such failure to inform new and better success.

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Success Story

I expect that a year of teaching will always contain many little success (and many little failures), so long as one allows oneself to notice them. Allowing oneself to notice them isn’t always so easy to do, especially when they seem dimmed by the magnitude of their corresponding failures, but they’re there for noticing when the mood improves.

Most successes, or at least the most noticeable ones, or the ones we’re most inclined to care at all about, involve individual students. That’s probably as much a function of what we care about as it is of where our successes lie. Nobody, so far as I know, wants to teach in order to improve test scores, and such successes are only valuable to most of us since they represent collections of little successes, each one with an individual student.

It’s hard to pick one of those little successes to elevate above the others. I had students who aggravated me from moments after meeting them, but whom I came to love. I had students who brought discipline problems into my classroom, but who brought them less and less as the year went on – some of them eventually bringing none at all. There are the students who email me now, and who tell me they’re sad I left their school. (Most of them never brought any significant problems to my room, and were just pleased to be around a competent adult who was eager to push them.)

“J.” sticks out in my mind. He wasn’t especially poorly behaved, but not especially well behaved either. He was in my most tiring class, with a lot of kids who were or who thought they were too old or too uninterested or too tough to give much of a damn about anything in school, least of all grammar and literature, and there a lot of problems resulted. J. would get drawn into them sometimes. He would talk a lot, and say sarcastic things. I thought he had a sense of superiority, and it gave him a difficult attitude sometimes, but his sense wasn’t wholly inaccurate. He was exceptionally smart, would see things and understand things that were beyond his classmates. I suppose very smart people constantly faced with foolishness, arbitrariness, and incompetence may tend toward senses of superiority, and distance.

He normally did not need to be disciplined, especially compared to many of his classmates, but when he did he reacted harshly to it. He would talk when he shouldn’t, he would break other rules, and he would be bitterly angry when I said anything about it. Many times I talked to him in the hall, or got him to stay after school, and made clear to him that I recognized his intelligence and respected it. He didn’t really read much, which was ordinary, but I learned that he was unashamed to admit publicly when he did, and even that he sometimes liked it. This was not so ordinary. I sometimes tried to push books on him, things that I liked when I was in high school, and he never cared to take them; but he didn’t suggest that the idea was absurd, and even seemed to appreciate the offers.

In the last week of school, when finals were done and grades were in and the students knew it, and when, therefore, hardly any of them showed up, J. was in my room almost every period, almost every day. What few kids were around wandered the halls freely, and looked for teachers who would let them play cards or hook up video games in their rooms (I wouldn’t). J. spent a lot of that week in my room, with a few others who wandered in and out. I taught them sudoku, and we watched movies that I thought were worth their time. (Several kids showed up for The Chronicles of Narnia and word-of-mouth spread quickly about Whalerider; only J. sat through Casablanca.) We talked about the news, and the school, and about the town and county. We talked a little about languages and about mathematics. I thought that week was extraordinary, and that the teaching I did then was some of the most valuable that I could do. The week was successful, and though I don’t expect ever to hear from him again, it showed me how successful I’d been with J.