I’m almost to the end of my first semester teaching, and suddenly I’m wondering where all the time went. I look back at an overwhelming amount of notes on plans I meant to implement and didn’t, meetings with colleagues and mentors giving me conflicting advice, management strategies I never got to work. Six months ago, I wrote lists of all the things I meant to accomplish in my first semester. Looking back on them, I realize how many of my objectives were only half-completed, and how much I needed to do that never made it onto the original lists. I understood intellectually that teaching in an inner-city school would be hard, but I didn’t “grok” that on a deep level, didn’t really understand what it meant.
It’s easy to focus on my shortcomings as a teacher, but there’s also a lot that I learned. The names of my seventy-five ninth-grade math students. Random details about their lives that come up during side conversations, when they hang out in my room during lunch or before school, or occasionally, when someone comes to me with a problem during another class. Which children come from strong, supportive families; which children’s families are run by older siblings in the absence of strong parents, or in the absence of parents at all. Which parts of math children fear or just don’t know — the inability to grasp the concept of a variable representing a number, or the near-universal fear of fractions. Fractions? Didn’t I learn fractions in fourth grade? But it doesn’t help to berate children for their ignorance — they just shut down and refuse to work. I learned how useful the TI-83′s [→ FRAC] function was, and gave up on some of my idea that everyone should be able to do it all on paper. You have to cut corners and take shortcuts, if you’re going to get anywhere at all.
I don’t think I anticipated just how much on my own I would be. Ultimately, despite the supervision and the mentorship, it’s just me and twenty-five kids in a classroom, and I have to figure out how to make them believe that I mean business. This is a lot harder than I thought — as it turns out, I don’t have a great sense for what effective teachers do to convey that they are effective teachers, other than teaching effectively. With smaller classes, they respect me because they know that I can teach them; with my larger classes, where someone is almost always trying to speak while I’m talking, it’s harder, because there are kids I’ve never been able to reach. In retrospect, I can’t help wishing that I’d had more of a chance to observe highly effective math teachers in action, before having to learn to be one on my own. It often feels like, even with all the advice I’ve been getting, I’m making everything up as I got along, and very little of it seems to stick. I’ve had trouble implementing simple things, like a seating chart, and I know I must be doing something wrong if everyone else can get it to work.
There’s a vicious cycle when things are going badly — I come home too tired to try to fix things, too tired to call parents and report on their kids’ progress, so things just get worse the next day. I’m not sure how to break out of it — mostly, I think it’s about willpower. Part of it’s about time management, too — if I can spend quality time not thinking about teaching, it’s easier to spend time working on teaching, instead of procrastinating on it.
I don’t regret this teaching experiment yet. I still think I would’ve regretted not having the guts to try it. I still think I can get it to work. I have great co-workers who’re mostly also young, new teachers, and I ought to rely on them more for support and advice. I have to plan things in advance, keep better records, make myself more accountable — if I can do all those things, I think I’ll be a more airtight teacher, and a more respectable adult. I have to figure out how to structure my life so that I can impose structure on my students’ lives. In so many cases, it feels like they know to be good when someone’s watching them, but haven’t internalized the rules enough to take care of themselves. That’s my biggest challenge, right there — getting twenty-four students to behave while I’m paying attention to the twenty-fifth. But if I could teach my students self-discipline, the math would come easily, and the Regents would be a breeze.
