Go Confidently in the Direction of Your Dreams

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the 

life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, 

the laws of the universe will be simpler." 

Henry David Thoreau

The first class of students I taught graduated last night. Our school uses trimesters, and I only taught senior classes for the first trimester; my time with them seems like a memory of an old rain cloud that has since past. At the beginning of this year, I was very green (I'm not talking being eco friendly here; I mean green, the old-fashioned way). I butted heads with a lot of students; in fact, practically my whole period 5 class. They hated me, I tried my hardest not to hate them, they didn't do homework and wanted to talk all during class, I tried to get them do work and wanted to cry all during class (shockingly I've just about made it through my first year without shedding one tear; I came quite close once but the tear did not fall), and basically period 5 and I shared a mutual existence in school hell. 

I have since come to better understand the good that exists in each of my students as I have let go of our roles of student and teacher and tried to embrace our mutual humanity. I remember it being really hard to read students' work when papers had comments like "You are only my teacher and nothing to me, so don't try," " This was supposed to be our fun senior year and you've ruined it," and my all-time favorite, "This class makes me want to put a bullet through my head." At least the last comment was the final line of a poem that utilized each of the five senses. It was very challenging and practically impossible for me not to take these comments as an attack on my teaching and me as a person (Eckard Tolle's A New Earth was a great help for moving past these types of judgements). So to say the least, this graduating class, which embodies my first round of mistakes, carried some baggage for me.

Graduation was amazing. As I watched each signifier of my various mistakes walk across the stage at graduation, I realized that we both made it. I just smiled and clapped to my palms hurt for every student because I wanted each of my students to see that despite our head butting, I recognized, supported and was pushing for their accomplishments--their humanity--the whole time. The most rewarding part of graduation was having students who I failed smile at me as they walked by my seat; some smiles were a bit uncomfortable and some were genuine. Such smiles seemed to be mutual recognitions of our mistakes and our successes. 

The best smile I shared was with A. He was a student I admired from the beginning because of his natural ability for symbolic, analytical and artistic thinking, but at the time he wasn't ready to give respect to a young, first-year, female teacher, and the young, first-year, female teacher had no idea that his anger towards her stemmed from something deep within and reacted to it very personally. Last night his smile was bright, just like his soul, and being on the receiving end of it felt good. No, it felt great. It gave me hope for him and it gave me hope for me.

After I went home, I was lying in bed and was reflecting over the course of the night. I was thinking about the various mistakes I made (some that will be hard to let go of), and it dawned on me why I made every single one of my mistakes--I was trying my best to do what was best for my students. Sometimes while watching out for one, I hurt another in the process, but my motivation was always to give students the tools to become better people. This realization brought a bit of sunshine to that rain cloud in the distance.

Every New Beginning Comes From Some Other Beginning's End...

This seems like a pivotal moment for me--my very first blog, which happens (or not so happens) to come in the closing days of my first year of teaching high school English. At this time I would like to make a disclosure about this post and all future posts: Although I am an English teacher, I'm a bit of a fraud; I was raised in the same type of educational system that I am now working in and for that reason (and no fault of my own, of course) my grammar and vocabulary do not always "adhere" to the normal English conventions. In short, I'm still working on my grammar, and I will always be a life-long vocabulary enhancer (just a few years behind my peers). OK, now that one-third of my teaching insecurities is out there, I will continue on.



I could start this blog fifty different ways: a rant about the current state of education, a rant about how everyone has forgotten the point of education, a rant about the system I work within (local and national), a rant about standardized testing (although, I'd be more inclined to praise it than speak against it), a rant about the students' lack of respect for me and their education, a rant about the parents who don't care, a rant about parents that care for all the wrong reasons, a rant about all the people who think teaching is the career path for "those who can't do" and includes the perk of a "two-month paid vacation," etc., etc. I guess my attempt to avoid ranting turned into a rant, but it must be unavoidable in one's first year. But I would really like to start my blog on a positive note because despite all the "stuff" that I learned about in my first year, it's been an amazing nine months--amazingly hard but more importantly, amazingly rewarding.



Today my favorite junior class and I were discussing Britney Spears (actually, we were reading the article "Shooting Britney" from the January issue of Atlantic Monthly sans the line about Lindsay Lohan's recreational use of drugs and a thirteen-letter swear word; in all honesty, I missed the thirteen-letter swear word in my pre-photocopy editing and the students, like bees drawn to honey, pointed it out to me before we reached reading the mother-of-all swears as a class; the bell rang when we were about ten lines above the profanity, and--technically/administratively speaking--I was saved by the bell). We recently just finished reading The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde and in an effort to foster an appreciation of Wilde's comic and analytical genius (and stress literature as universal subject that transcends the barriers of time), we have been discussing and reading articles about materialism and consumerism in contemporary American society. We were talking about our incessant desire to consume more and more; I (un)subtly brought celebrity culture into our discussion.

I love these discussions because you can see it in a young mind's eyes when he or she has never considered the idea you are discussing: the eyes stay wide open and sometimes you see the eyebrows and forehead become tense which creates a wonderful image full of innocence and blossoming maturity in one. But I had one of my favorite discussion moments today that was not very much like this.

As we read about the amount of money Britney Spears the product makes for the various media mediums ($100 million) and how much the pictures of celebrities sell for these days, one student, P, raised his hand and then caught the mini-football we toss around to handraisers in order to sustain a level of order that I cannot function without. And with cool and developing confidence he said, "People used to say a picture is worth a thousand words, now it's worth a thousand dollars." Immediately, this statement struck me as astute and deeply profound, and I knew instantly is was a special moment for me. I had helped this student reach a thought that far exceeded my own perception and level of thought. I love it when that happens. Several students do this occasionally (one in particular is practically failing my class but that's a rant for another day) and it amazes me. But no student up until P had uttered something so succinct and meaningful (at least to me) in my classroom thus far. It was just one of those moments when I thought to myself "Wow, that was cool."

The year is coming to an end, and I can't start to wait prepping this summer. I want to help create as many wow-that-was-cool moments as possible. Corny? Yes, but oh so true.