Today is one of those days in which the pressures of teaching have me feeling down. I've been out of my classroom sick for a few days, and managed to suck it up to attend a literacy conference at the IU I've been looking forward to. I figured sitting and being a student would be a lot less strenuous than juggling the three ring circus that is my classroom.
I'm sure it's the February-March slump with state testing right around the corner that's truly gotten me down. As much as I hate the state test, as much as I tell myself I don't give a rip about how my kids perform on that test, I still feel the pressure to have them do well on it. I question if I did everything I could this year (a year that is not even close to over), what could I do better, why did I give in to pressures and do silly things I know my students won't use outside of my classroom, but maybe they do need that knowledge and I'm holding them back by not exposing them to it, or maybe I'm just going crazy and losing all signs of intelligence in my own life, I mean really how many run-on sentences is this now?
Maybe this post should be my hamster wheel brain part deux.
The conference I attended today was on New Literacies - digital literacies if you will. Our kids are technology natives and yet only a single digit percent of them can navigate the wide world of the internet for information - factual information. This scares me.
I soaked up all of the information I could today, started planning ways to do better in the future and save what time I still have left with this group, and sat still for a moment just feeling - - - defeated.
One person can not do it all. I can sure try, but we need teamwork in a school to do this right.
In my not so humble opinion, I sit back and think about the education I want for my children, and this is truly the heart of it. They need to be curious. They need to solve problems. Real problems. They need to use their intellect to make the world a better place. They do not need to practice taking multiple choice tests. They do not need to memorize facts, especially if they aren't ever going to apply those facts to anything of importance.
However, this is not just a teacher problem. This is a school problem. An education problem. Most recently, a society problem. I am no administrator - I can't create local change. So what do I do? I'm never going to stop doing things in my own classroom. Sharing ideas with my colleagues. But is that enough?
This is the time of the year where I feel like a bad teacher. Add me to the list of teachers who've continued to fail our students year after year - the ones who give teaching the bad reputation it can't seem to shake.
This is the time of year where I feel hopeless and at the bottom of a mountain I'm not sure how to climb.
Yet as I sit here at the bottom looking up, I know there's room to grow. I know I've made a difference somewhere. But I'm stuck down here festering in the mire. Stuck in the pit of despair, paralyzed by wheel of pain, waiting for Andre the Giant to rescue me.
For today, I'll go to sleep hoping my body can make it through a school day tomorrow. Another day out of the classroom would just make me feel like more minutes have been ticked off of my clock of opportunity with these kids.
I think it's time for some toddler dance moves to shake off this pity party. Tomorrow is a new day. Hopefully we'll all learn something worth learning.
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