Failures: AY 2006-2007

Failure Story

Rather than a single unsuccessful venture, I am going to focus on the way in which I most profoundly failed each of three critical components: my students, my parents, and myself.

Part I : Students

At the end of the year, my most egregious offense against my students seems to have been a lack of planning. I do not owe my students a complete, typed, by-the-book lesson plan every day; they will never know the difference. I do not think that my occasional failure to return student work in a timely manner for the first overwhelming term drastically affected the climate of my classroom or the success of my students. I stayed after school, I attended their functions, I showed that I cared. What I never did for them was show them where we were going, where we had been, and how the two were related. I rarely knew what I was teaching more than a day or two ahead of time, and that resulted in a classroom that felt just slightly off-balance most days.

Oftentimes, it seems, you don’t know what you’ve been missing till you try it. Finally in the fourth term, and for only one of my three preps, I made a tentative schedule for the last month of school and it made a world of difference to my students. They came in to class knowing what to expect. They were mentally prepared for upcoming assignments, their parents called me with questions, and the students themselves demonstrated a greater sense of responsibility for the work they knew they had to do. Being perfectly honest, I did that one schedule a lot more for myself than for them, because we had an assignment to complete, because I needed to figure out how many classes we had left, because I realized belatedly that it would make things a lot clearer not only for them but for me, too. But when I told them in class about the long-term schedule they clamored for a copy to the point that I interrupted class and ran off a set of my own hand-written notes of “what to expect for the next five weeks.”

Not every student kept up with it, not every student read it, not every student listened in class when I explained it to them but it made enough of a difference to enough of my students that I realized I really should have been doing it all year.

It is easier for them to care about something if they think it matters, and it is easier for them to believe that it matters if it is tied in to topics that then tie in, in some way, to their lives. Looking back, I wound up with a few pretty decent units that were, in fact, related. Had I merely discovered this before teaching the material, taken the time to write up a schedule and a brief explanation, and passed this information along to my students, perhaps we all would have been a little bit more successful.

Next year …

Part II : Parents

In essence, I failed to communicate with my parents. The only parents I saw were the ones who came to see me, and in most situations those are the ones you need to see the least. I rarely informed parents of what we had going on in class, I never provided them with an opportunity to actively participate, and I failed even to let them know when their children were failing.

Again, slight improvements in the fourth term: I created a website for one of my classes that informed parents of upcoming assignments as well as my contact information. The website also linked to an online grade book, so parents did not have to wait for bi-weekly progress reports that may or may not have gotten home to see what their student had failed to turn in. This helped, and more parents contacted me. Again, next year will be better.

Part III: Myself

The way in which I most profoundly failed myself was a daily denial of all the work that had to be done. To some extent, this is healthy and necessary, but when it carries on for weeks or even months it becomes detrimental not only to the students and the instruction but to one’s own psyche as well. As I let things spiral farther out of control, as I took less and less responsibility for things that I knew had to be done, I became variably despondent, desperate, or sometimes both. For the third term that I taught, I graded almost nothing until two days before midterms. I took two personal days, spent the entire time grading papers, and managed to submit something to the administration. The build-up to Christmas break was worse. I graded nothing from midterms to exams while assigning massive projects with painfully specific rubrics, projects that were eventually graded on a cold night in January based, yes, on completion.

I drove away from my school on a December afternoon with the announcement still ringing in my ears that all grades must be in before we left for break. I received for Christmas, from my mother, a corkboard with a painting of schoolbooks and the words “Ms. Smith – Teachers Shape the Future.” It stayed in my car for four months because I was unable to muster the courage to acknowledge that someone, anyone, even my own mother two hundred miles away, actually believed in me.

I graded nothing over break. I cried for three days before I came back, and spent the first three days of the first week of third term teaching very little, sleeping less, and feverishly grading anything I thought someone might call me on if I didn’t. Grades were submitted Wednesday of that week (even mine) and third term was a near-miraculous reversal in which I vowed, Scarlett O’Hara style, to never put myself through that again.

Papers were graded almost instantaneously, grades were recorded, papers were redistributed, and term’s end hasn’t bothered me since.

But that was a hellish 9 weeks.