conclusion

I write this at the close of one chapter of my life and the opening of another. I have survived my two years in the wilderness, and I am stronger for it. I can think of nothing harder than getting up every morning and getting up in front of those kids. I have been knocked about like no other, but I am still here to tell my story.

When I began teaching, I wasn’t a teacher. I thought, like so many do, that teaching would be easier than it is; I thought, like so many do, that the kids would immediately take to me; I thought, like so many do, that I’d be good at it from the first day. On all three counts, I was laughably wrong.

I still remember my day one activity for my first hour as a high school teacher. I wince as I write this: I had the kids stand up, say their names, and announce their favorite foods. I remember one particularly large young lady standing up and informing the class that her favorite foods were “crackers and water.” Everyone of course erupted; fifteen minutes into my first day, and there were already too many jokes being told in my classroom. For the next nine months I suffered for it. This year I began differently: I curtly introduced myself, and introduced immediately my first lesson on nouns.

I feel like a teacher now. My job is to expose kids to things they would otherwise never have been exposed to: literature, history, culture, the arts. I assign work, I grade it, and if a kid doesn’t do the work, my computer averages in a zero. I agonized constantly throughout my first year about what it means to be a teacher, and how to strike an effective balance between guided and independent practice, and how to build a classroom environment that encourages both creativity and responsibility, and so on and so forth. My second year, I see teaching as a much simpler economy: I get paid to teach them, and they get grades for doing my work. Teaching was once a mystery; now it’s just a job.

I realize how jaded I must sound as I write this, and to some extent it’s true: my first year I wanted to know everything about each one of the precious little snowflakes staring up at me. My second year, I wanted to know how much work they were doing for me, and little else.

To non-teachers, this is heresy. I remember last year telling my father about one particular boy who was skipping, sleeping, and failing his way to another year in English I. I believe I took appropriate steps to inform the administration, but despite frequent contact with our district’s parent liaison, I was never able to find a working phone number for the boy’s parents. I found little else to do but shrug my shoulders and soldier on, continuing to write him up as consistently as I found the energy to. The administration of course found out about the whole thing too late, and when I was asked (too soft a word) why I never informed his parents of his poor grades and attendance, I explained that my best efforts to procure a phone number had been unsuccessful. Her response: “Well, everybody knows his daddy works at SuperValu!”

(N.B. Similarly unreasonable things happened to me every single day.)

In any case, I brought this story up with my father, who is a child psychiatrist. He told me: “Well, I would have had to start going to SuperValu every week and looking for his dad and letting his dad know how the kid was doing.” I would love to agree, but with one-hundred-and-fifty students, many of whom need all the positive adult attention they can get, I can’t. There is only so much work in me.

I am still an idealist. I still believe in democracy, and America, and though I have to pause before writing it, I still believe in our public schools. I agree with the critics who say that some parents today don’t know how to raise their kids, and I agree with them that many kids are at school just to eat lunch and socialize. Instead of blaming parents, or the free lunch program, or teenage hormones, however, perhaps we in education should think about what we are doing wrong. Provided the dropout rate in Mississippi and America, we must be doing a great deal wrong.

School should be the best thing in children’s lives. School should be a place of safety, freedom, and passion; children are natural learners, and our job as teachers is simply to retain the initial enthusiasm of seeing something they’ve never seen before. Yet so many kids hate school, because to them school is a chaotic, abusive, daily assault on the senses; how can someone learn if they can’t even relax? I see kids bullying other kids every day and it troubles me greatly. I do my best to stop it, but my best isn’t enough. I feel safe saying that when feelings are hurt, learning is compromised.

Thus, if I were describe my professional growth throughout the MTC program, I would offer a paradox: on the one hand, teaching has become for me a nine-to-five (well, six-thirty to five) engagement. I care a great deal for the kids, of course (how could one not?), but I realize that my ability as a teacher to reach them is limited. Teaching is just too much of a machine to give each gear the attention it needs. Thus, the other half of the paradox: teaching is such an important, difficult job that the greatest teacher in the world is simply unable to give our kids everything they deserve. The hardest part of teaching is realizing that even the best teachers can’t save every life.

I’m a much better teacher now than I was two years ago. Classroom management has been a long nightmare for me, and I’m only now starting to wake up. When I first started teaching I was afraid of my newfound authority. I hesitated when I should have acted, rightly or wrongly. Part of me wishes I could see it all again: the paper balls, the fights, the cursing, the shouting, my car keyed, my books vandalized, “Mr. Heston is a ass” written on the side of my desk, any number of the thousand other punishments that I brought upon myself. My classroom discipline has improved a thousand-fold, but I’m still not satisfied; I have seen how easily a student asking another student for a pencil can escalate into a fight. That I think is one sign of a true teacher: the discipline is never good enough. I love my students, and I want to protect them; classroom management promotes learning by protecting the students.

I don’t know how I can support the assertion that my classroom discipline has improved without any tangible evidence, but I can see the results myself when I watch my students. The kids like me better. They smile more in class. They participate more in class, because they’re not so afraid of some bully calling them stupid or a suck-up or saying they have bad breath or all those other inexcusable things kids like to do to each other. And, believe it or not, they have learned more. “Romeo and Juliet” is the flagship unit for the school right now; kids I’ve never taught have been asking me questions about it. More kids stop by after school, to play chess or talk or just hang out. A part of me is very pleased.

I am writing this at my desk at school; thanks to the state Algebra test, I have a few surreptitious hours alone in an empty classroom. On the walls I see posters my students have made of Shakespearean vocabulary words (“sirrah,” “’zounds,” and “fishified” being my favorites), pictures they have drawn or cut from magazines, messy notebooks they have forgotten in my room, and beaming Polaroids of my students of the week. I am leaving this job for a job teaching sixth-grade English in Honduras next year, to learn Spanish and to see a new culture. Nonetheless, there is a great deal here that I will miss, because I know that I will never see it again.