I find myself in this exact mental mode during presentations and meetings. Not. a. good. thing. [via Strobist]
Year: 2007
Total 339 Posts
[preamble – i’ve gotta put this navel-gazing, to-quit-or-not-to-quit arc aside for a good while, if not for my sanity, for the sake of the good folks who pay me some mind. a lot of good comments & questions have gone unanswered but not unappreciated.]
That header is an accurate โ if blunt โ summary of this whole mess. I texted it to my girl from my usual spot last night after a friend came in and told me I looked tired. If I looked like I felt, he was right, if also a jerk for sayin’ so.
The incredible paradox of this job, summarized quickly, in one anecdote:
I spent an hour on a slide set last night, scaffolding several examples into maybe ten slides, all building to a worksheet. An hour.
Then I set into the worksheet and realized halfway through I was going about the scaffolding all wrong. I had a much better idea so I scrapped an hour’s work and re-built the slides.
I don’t know if I’m glad that idea struck or if I would’ve preferred ignorance. Once that idea struck, though, I know my options shrunk to one, even though it cost me some rest.
I admit that it’s easy for me to ledger up those lost hours and write some whiny post about it, maybe pretending at earnest career contemplation, but that position, I realized this morning, is extremely complicated.
‘Cause, see, as exhausted as I am here at the end of one of my twice-weekly plan-and-teach-a-thons, today I witnessed a painful concept explained clearly. I was personally privileged with that explanation, one which soaked up half as many slides as originally planned, one which tied itself cutely into a metaphor outside the classroom, one which, as it rarely does, met each of my kids at her ability.
I am so smitten and so humbled by that experience, it’s got me a little giggly. These times come wrapped in paper, tied in ribbon, and as long as I can un-remember what they cost my body, my relationships, and my ballooning to-do list last night, I know my career will survive at least a couple more.
If I taught physics, I’d rent all of these, then use this and this to extract playback-ready clips. Then I’d salt them throughout the school year unceremoniously, as the attention span of my classroom demanded.
From the mailbag
Jonathan, from Admin v. Doctorate:
Why canโt you manage your effort/energy better? Itโs a little problem.
Two text-heavy slides from last year:
The same two slides, revised and expanded this year:
I can’t settle on what I know to be inferior.
I reckon we agree that some people shouldn’t teach. Maybe, like me, you think that’s pretty obvious.
What is less obvious to me, but what is also, honestly, no lie, probably true, is that I am one of them. I imagine this seems like a bit of pointless self-deprecation to most, but it’s an idea that’s made a lot of sense of a lot of frustration these last few weeks.
Like with those two slidedecks up there, I can’t settle on what I know to be inferior, no matter how much time it costs me. This is an attribute which, in my life, has always lived on the line between vice and virtue.
Once teaching and I met, however, it became fully vice. Teaching, like no other job I’ve worked, is greedy for that work ethic. It takes and doesn’t stop taking.
I used to think that relentlessness made me great for this job but now I’m not sure.
A Stephen Downesian cross-posted comment, here in reply to a post by Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year who writes:
So many of my concerns about the nuances of classroom management can be addressed most effectively if I simply focus my energy on making my classroom fun, challenging, and engaging.
I don’t have your experience or acclaim but I share your revelation. Here, at the start of my fourth year, I’ve realized that what seemed the essential challenge of my first three years was largely a fool’s errand.
The challenge, I’ve decided, isn’t in establishing an airtight and comprehensive system for dealing with misbehavior (that pyramid of discipline: verbal warning, written warning, parent contact, detention, suspension, etc.).
The challenge is in creating a classroom environment so supportive, so engaging, and so respectful that misbehavior doesn’t intentionally cross a student’s mind and when it crosses her mind incidentally, as it inevitably will, its correction involves a civil, straightforward conversation outside.
Reading your description and then describing it to myself in this comment makes me feel like a dope for realizing it only this year. But, to my credit, the revolution that’s brought me here has been intensely personal and only a little bit professional. Pent up in my desire to control was a lot of fear, I think.
Unfortunately I’m not sure how to describe that release to myself, much less anyone else.
[Updated: ’cause I botched the link to the TOY.]