The Way We Weren't

Today was my last first day of school as a classroom teacher, and it's bittersweet.

I'm very excited to be doing something new next year, but then I know there will be many aspects of being a classroom teacher that I will miss. No matter how bad of a semester I may have had, I still managed to get sort of excited for the first day of the next semester, thinking about new things I could try, etc. I really love some of the units I teach because I have learned a lot about myself as a person through teaching high school for 8 years. I have really helped a lot of AP Language students grow as mature thinkers and writers.

I think that teaching others is perhaps one of the hardest things we try to do as humans because ultimately we cannot control other people. We can study all of the psychology we want; most people are aberrations anyway, so we just stick with what seems to work. We have to be able to transfer knowledge to each other, though; otherwise, how else would mankind have survived for this long? Nowadays we seem to think that we can only learn from each other using technology, which I think is seriously flawed logic.

It is highly possible that I have learned more from my students over the past 8 years than they learned from me. I am still a highly introverted person, introspective, and quiet. Unless you really know me. Some people who read this blog might know my other side that is loud, sarcastic, and perhaps slightly annoying. :) It's been sort of tough meshing these different sides of myself as a teacher because, frankly, I sometimes have a hard time taking myself so seriously that I think a classroom full of 18 year-olds should. I more or less have just tried to develop units and lessons over the years that were more interesting and thought-provoking for the students rather than sticking with stuff that promoted the image of me pontificating from my podium.

Overall, this method has worked very well for me. My students often tell me they learned a lot in my class, and about topics that they didn't really know much about before. My seniors research ethical issues in science when we read Frankenstein and they pick a banned or challenged book to read, research, and write an argument about in terms of the usefulness of book censorship and intellectual freedom. My AP students...they do too much for me to want to write here. :)

But I have to once again come back to last semester's English 4 class. The one I still can't believe happened. Driving home today, I was trying to think of a way to describe them. And I can't. It wasn't a class only of bad kids who always hated me and each other. It wasn't a class of students who just wanted to get it over with already in order to graduate. And it wasn't a class of students who were studious and interested in learning (hah!). They were all of those things combined. Every single day. I can't even decide if we ended on a positive or a negative note, which is very fitting (although the fact that one girl gave the class the finger as she walked to the door to go to the restroom leads me to believe that's ending on a negative note). Nothing was steady or predictable. Very hard to try to characterize.

And I have no idea if I learned anything from that experience except to just get through each day and try to help someone learn something (well, actually my goal was not to completely lose my cool every day). One student thanked me for having them use LiveBinders.com to complete an online writing portfolio. But before that she smarted off to me after I dressed her down for attempting to copy someone else's work. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't do well with ambiguity in dealing with people. I like to know definitively where I stand. Do you like me, or not? Now, the students liking me is not something I care about as a teacher. This is what I want to be clear, as a teacher: are you going to come into class with war paint on, or are you going to try to work with me? If that's not clear to me, I have a hard time.

So this is The Way We Weren't: we weren't clearly in love or in hate. We weren't in love with learning or with failing. We weren't anything that can be clearly communicated because their identity as a class shifted every week to something else that I had to adapt to.

I guess you had to be there.