The school year ended today. It was as I predicted: lots of joy, fair amounts of crying. I told one tearful girl, “It gets less painful every time you reach the end of something like this.” Did I lie? She seemed to think, at the very least, that I didn’t know what I was talking about.
Why is it nostalgia is so much more potent when we’re young? Perhaps it’s simply our general lack of experience, and we’re often thinking, “It can’t get any better than this was,” and so we’re melancholy. Maybe it’s part of the naiveté of youth, but this too is a result of being inexperienced in the cycles of contemporary life.
Of course, there were as many not tearful as there were with glistening cheeks. Perhaps they’re not as sentimental as the rest of us. Perhaps they have more experience in their fourteen years that has taught them the transience of most things. Sadly, it might be that they learned about temporariness from the love, attention, and affection they’ve received.
I have at least one such student every year. I always feel like I let him down. I always look back at the year and see countless opportunities to do more, to be more, for such students.
It leaves me wondering, once again, about the marks of a successful year. Testing-wise, I was very successful: I met my MAP score goals, and my E1H EOC grades average was just where I thought it should be. Yet what use are acronyms in determining a successful year? It seems a relatively shallow metric.
The truth is, I became a teacher because I simply love working with kids. Perhaps a selfish reason: I do get a certain high when I connect with a kid and feel I’ve somehow helped him. It’s hardly altruism, especially considering the times I’m doing the opposite: the moments when the urge to take a ridiculous behavior personally and become viscous becomes overwhelming. So maybe it’s not surprising that I have the depressive phases to go along with the manic moments.
This is all to explain why I’m feeling down even though it’s the end of the year.
Another kid left today that I find myself thinking, “I’d like to have another shot with him.” I’d like to have him in my classroom another year and manage to get myself out of the way and see what he needs and give it to him. His needs were not to be met by following the curriculum or making him play by all the admittedly arbitrary rules of the classroom. There was more going on in his life than iPods and texting friends, and I’ve a suspicion a large amount of it was negative. My class might have been one of the few bright spots in his day, but looking back over the year, I doubt it. I communicated to him all the things I swore I never would express through body language and tone to a student.
I finally caught on at the end of the year. (Why did it take so damn long? I knew — I had a similar student last year, and I swore I wouldn’t do what I did this year.) While other students were working on a final project, I realized the project might easily turn into yet another zero for him, and so I differentiated: I had him write an essay on three things he could do next year to meet with more success in the classroom. I gave him a pencil and a legal pad (he seldom had materials), and he always replaced the items on my desk at the end of the class.
What I read when he was done was a stinging condemnation, though he was polite in his tone and word choice. He didn’t even mean to condemn me. He just shared some feelings. Feelings of inadequacy that I fear I only heightened. Feelings of hopelessness that I worry I did nothing to assuage. Feelings of being trapped and only vaguely realizing it.
Real success in the classroom is not measured in completed assignments and MAP/ITBS/PASS scores. Success in the classroom is measured with a metric that, like black holes and dark matter, is hypothetical at best. We can infer it from a student’s smile, or a boy’s pride at walking into class having pencil and paper, or a girl’s wide eyes at getting a C on a test.
I forget this too often.
The school year ended today. It was as I predicted: lots of joy, fair amounts of crying. One girl said, “It’s not going to hit me until tonight. Then I’ll be sad.” And another student added, “And happy, cause we’re in high school.”
I know just how they feel. If only I can keep all this in mind until next August, when I’ll surely another Denny.