I TOOK A DAY



I couldn’t. I mean, I can’t. I am writing in real time just after I’ve completed the process of requesting a sick day from work on the eight day of school. I do feel a little bad, but I am experiencing anxiety and it’s as if I physically can’t go to work.

I know. I know. I was all excited to begin the school year, but something happened between “Welcome students!” and “I didn’t sign up for this.” I am teaching seniors, which in the past I’ve always preferred because of their analytical thinking skills, ability to have discourse, and their self-control. Well that was not what greeted me on the very first day. I was still optimistic. I considered that the students may have been overwhelmed because all of their classes are 80 minutes, but I accounted for that and broke up the lesson into mini activities. I even made exceptions about the room being so hot due to the end of summer heat wave that sent temperatures soaring past 90 degrees. I even understood that seniors are excited to be seniors, but that didn’t ease the anxiety that I’m experiencing right now.

The students are vulgar and disrespectful to each other. Therefore, I am disrespected because I am hit with ricochets from what they say to their peers. They take a long time to settle down even with an activity ready for them to complete and be graded immediately. They play too much and are the most immature group of seniors I’ve ever taught. They complain about people looking at them. Seriously!?

I showered this morning while trying to think of an exit plan. Although my superiors really like me, I have to take care of myself. I know that it would disappoint them, but I am the only one who can live my life. So I took a day.

Is it me? I’m beginning to ask myself this. Why have I struggled with student behavior for the last five years of my career? I am the same person. I teach with the same passion. I create engaging lessons that appeal to various learning styles. I can teach. I could point fingers and say that the students are the problem, due to bad parenting, but I can observe these same students in a different class and they are behaving. I don’t get it. The only thing that I am sure of is that many teachers feed the students. Seriously! I have to feed you to motivate you to learn? I have to feed you to sit quietly so that you can hear the directions? I’m trying to feed your mind the food will last for a lifetime.

 I haven’t given up completely, but today I need a break. It says a lot that we haven’t even been in school for two whole weeks and I am certain that it makes me appear extremely unprofessional and irresponsible, but I needed to recharge and there’s something about a weekday that makes it more effective than the weekend. It feels better. I want to be the best me I can be. So I took a day.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

YES, I'M JUDGING

Image
Here I go again sharing my two cents on something that came across my feed on Facebook. The title of the post “My Title 1 Kids Have $300 Shoes. And It’s Nobody Else’s Business” immediately caught my attention, because 1) I teach at a Title 1 high school and 2) I do judge the students and their parents when I see them with expensive products. The author of this article wrote with a strong tone of sympathy and compassion for her, presumably, immigrant student and his choice to purchase a pair of $300 soccer cleats. She doted on the fact that his family struggled financially and that he actually paid for the shoes himself by working with his father doing landscaping. She complimented the student’s motivation to work hard to get what he wanted and warned teachers against making assumptions and judgements about what our students and their families chose to purchase with their money. Now this is all fine and good, but it is not the narrative for most of the students that I t
Read more

HERE WE GO AGAIN

Image
It seems that every year there are changes in pedagogy. However, in my opinion, these new concepts are really old ones that are just repackaged and given fancy new names. With the constant influx of theories and research that dictate how we are to teach comes the teacher training workshops usually run by well-paid consultants who have rehearsed their presentation dozens of times to schools across the country, but never actually implementing them and of course not with the at-risk students that I teach. And let’s say that they have worked with students in a school district similar to mine. They most likely worked with a group of hand selected students or at a charter school. Needless to say, this is the case for me yet again this summer. My Title 1 school was awarded a grant to make improvements and one of those improvements is working with a program to improve overall academic performance and to give all  students the option to attend college. That’s perfectly fine with me, but
Read more

WHY I DON’T FEEL LIKE TEACHING TODAY

Image
Early in my teaching career, I worked at a high school that made people gasp when I told them that I worked there. It was no big deal to me. I did not encounter many disciplinary issues at all. However, the majority of the students that I taught were not motivated to learn. Each one had their own story and I understood, but on this one occasion I was a bit fed up. I had been teaching them the structure of a persuasive essay for a few days and wanted them to write with a bit more command. I was teaching the counterargument. What I thought would be one lesson took several. With that said, on one particular night I was confused and frustrated about why my students were struggling so much to address the counterargument in their essay. At that point a light bulb went off. I decided to write a model for them to analyze (I found that the exemplars that I wrote for them helped a bit more than the exemplars found on the web because I wrote about topics that they could relate to, so that'
Read more