already week 6

Tomorrow, I begin my sixth week of instruction. Yes, I've been teaching a fifth grade class for nearly a month and a half. If you had asked me 6 weeks prior whether I'd make it this far, I'd have laughed in your face. But somehow (literally, by the grace of God), I'm here. I'm 9 instructional days away from our first benchmark period. I'm just about 3 weeks away from the end of the first quarter. I'm 5 weeks away from our week-long Fall Break; 11 weeks away from our week-long Thanksgiving Break; 15 weeks away from two weeks of Winter Break and the half-way point of my first year of teaching.

I have no idea how I'm at this point. People have been telling me how depressed I sound in a lot of my away/status messages and in my IM and phone conversations. And, to be frank, it has been that depressing. Consider this: most first-year teachers have attended school to be prepared for the classroom; they've been student teachers and have taken courses on classroom management and educational theory; and despite all of this training, a lot of them have a really hard time in the classroom. Then there's me (and the typical first-year TFA member). I was writing a senior honors thesis regarding the branding of cruise lines and working towards a B.S. in Hotel Administration less than 6 months ago. I had 5 weeks of "intensive training" (which while helpful, really is nothing like the real classroom); then, I was thrown into the classroom at the beginning of August with no idea of how all of this really worked.

And perhaps that's the only consolation I find each day. The fact that I'm terribly (literally) new at this teaching thing. As my assistant principal put it, I've only been teaching for about 25 days. While I might be in 1.5 months into this thing, I've been actually teaching for less than a month. And the number of days I've been teaching curriculum is right around 15 days.

No wonder I still don't have it put together! I'm trying to learn an entirely new profession, and I've been at it for 15 flippin' days. No wonder I still don't have any really organized systems. No wonder I still have a hard time lesson-planning for an entire week. No wonder I still don't know how to do interactive lessons. No wonder I still suck at managing my classroom. No wonder I still feel anxious each morning and desperately pray that I get through each day. No wonder I still have trouble understanding the mentality of 10 year olds. No wonder I still need to work late each night and don't have my life together. Unless you count hula-hooping as a major life achievement, I don't think I've become proficient at something in 15 days.

Funny thing is no one is expecting me to be an amazing teacher at this point. The principal, the assistant principal, the academic advisers at my school, the veteran teachers, the Teach For America program directors, my ASU instructors... no one has said that I'm not trying hard enough or that I'm being a bad teacher. They all say take it one step at a time. Sadly, I think that this is just the reality of first-year-teacher-dom. And the constant reminder from other teachers that things will come together by winter break is not just a saying; by then (hopefully), I'll have practiced being a teacher enough that it starts to come a bit more automatically.

What the past two weeks have given me, though, is amazing PERSPECTIVE. At the end of my fourth week, I really did not want to continue teaching. It was too much. I didn't have a life. I was stressed out (beyond what I'm normally used to). And top it all off, I had left my laptop in the classroom that weekend.

But, in the midst of what might and should have been the craziest weekend of my life, came so many moments of reflection and peace. I met with my Program Director (yay Ari) that weekend and not only did she work with me to help me figure out the reason behind my students' lack of motivation but she told me that I had to set limits on myself - even something as simple as "I will only spend 20 minutes to research this lesson plan on the Internet." This was in addition to the conversation with Tish, my assistant principal, who reminded me that I had only been teaching for 20 days.

On Sunday, Pastor Justin at the new church I've decided to attend spoke about the true meaning behind Christian community. But what hit me was his reference to how narcissistic our culture has become. And then at lunch, I ruminated (big word!) over the concept with another TFA member who had gone to church with me that morning. What I realized was how self-centered I was about the whole "teaching" thing. I got angry when my kids misbehaved because it was a poor reflection of my classroom management. I got sad when my kids didn't do their work because it was a poor reflection of my teaching skills. I got flustered and stressed out when my lessons weren't going the way I wanted them to. Everything was centered on me. Where did my students fit into all of this?

I did not come into Teach For America to become a great teacher for the rest of my life. I did join so that I could help others, to use some of the skills that I had gained in college to somehow benefit others. So, the reason I was in the classroom, fundamentally, was for my students: to allow them to see that they have potential, and, above all, to provide them an intrinsic sense of worth and motivation. While my ability to lesson plan and have great instruction and be a wonderful manager of the classroom environment would equal how effectively my students might learn, the fact that I didn't have everything together did not mean that I wasn't helping my students in some way. As some teachers at my school put it, the fact that I came in each day willing to teach was, in some ways, worthy enough at this point in the teaching game. The fact that my students can have a teacher come in each day rather than leave and have a full-time substitute for the rest of the year was one way that I was already helping them.

I've definitely thought about and questioned Teach For America's mission and success over the past several weeks. How was I working to accomplish the goal of closing the achievement gap when I sucked in the classroom so much. Furthermore, how was the organization able to accomplish its mission when this suckiness and difficulty was faced not only by one corps member or by 1 region, but by corps members in all regions? If Jen teaching high school in Memphis, Yun Seok teaching fifth grade in Houston, Sharon teaching Kindergarten in San Jose all have the same difficulty and question their decision teach just as much as Celeste teaching Pre-K and me teaching fifth grade in Phoenix, then when would our students actually learn? Would we ever become the amazing teachers that we see in the Teach For America videos all the time?

But then that's the crazy thing about this whole movement. All of us suck like crazy, but, somehow, our students learn and achieve. Somehow, 11 out of the 14 rookie teachers of the year in our district last year were Teach For America. Somehow, the movement is effective enough that the President would mention it multiple times in the past year. Somehow, it works well enough to attract graduates from some of the best schools in the country. Somehow, it comes together.

And if it's all supposed to come together at some point, then, perhaps the only real skill I need to gain, in addition to the new perspective I've adopted, is patience. I need to understand that Rome was not built in a day (cliche, but so true). I need to understand that everything will come with time. I need to understand that I've really only taught for 15 days. I need to understand that I'm probably not going to prepare my most amazing lesson within the next week. I need to understand that perhaps that best thing that I can do for myself and my students is to be patient, with them, with myself, with this whole endeavor. I cannot put my life on hold and be stressed out everyday because, if I'm in a bad mood, everyone loses. But, when I can come to terms that not only am I bad at this but that it's okay to be bad at this and that I'll become better at some point, then I know that I'll truly have developed into the type of teacher that I would like to be.