DAR#13: Oooeeehhh, as my Granddaddy Matthews would have said. Today I worked half a day for the first time since the middle of January. Fun, and I'm tuckered. When I get really tired, my face twitches, so today as I was working with some students my face went bonkers. Very distracting. My hair's off to those of you who work a full day, five days a week. That's really crazy.
As many of you know, I love my work. I get to work with teachers who want my help to improve their teaching practice. Many of them are already excellent teachers. I have a lot of admiration for (and sympathy with) struggling teachers. It is often, after all, the ones who have a vision and passion for getting better who are struggling. Otherwise, why bother. In my observation and in my experience, teachers in their first two years at a school (even if they aren't brand new teachers) are the ones who struggle in that way that new swimmers struggle when they first get thrown into the deep end of the pool. So here are some ways you might recognize a struggling teacher. Please note that none of these examples are from this year, but all of them are from teachers in their first two years and two of them are of me.
Struggling teachers might:
do their weekly grocery shopping at 3 am because this is a time when they're too tired to grade papers.
arrive at their desk at 5 a.m. to read the dictionary.
hand papers to their somewhat drunken friends during a party and call out the answers so that their friends can grade them.
call their students "little f%@ckers" and stomp out of the classroom.
develop the habit of inserting "shhh" into their sentences, like a tic that happens without their knowledge even when no one else is talking: ie "Good morning. Shhh. I hope you had shhh a good shhh weekend. shhh.
rewrite their daily lesson plan for the third time because their partner said the first two were "boring."
cry whenever another person says to them, "How's it going?"
grade papers in the stands while "watching" a jv basketball game.
Here's to you workers of the world in whatever ways you struggle. Happy Monday! Mary
A Photograph of me without me in it
A photograph of me without me in it
I remember walking into a bank as a "struggling teacher". The tellers smiled at me and said, "May I help you?" and "Please." and "Thank you." and it was so very quiet and I went back out to my car and cried, wishing I hadn't majored in education but in bank tellering instead.
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