1 post from April 2008

There's a temptation, in writing this kind of reflection, to look back on my MTC experience the way a mountain climber at the summit looks back down the face he just scaled, feeling an immense sense of accomplishment.

Maybe it's my infrequent blogging, but at this point an honest reflection on my journey is far more mystifying, like the climber who sees clouds below and above him and can't tell where he is relative to the summit. Do I feel a sense of accomplishment? Maybe.

I feel a little frustrated that I can't describe the past two years with more pride, but I think a lot of that has to do with my switching schools after the first year. I've had, in effect, two first years, though in drastically different contexts.

In the last week of our first summer's training, I was pulled aside by the MTC'er who had just finished her last year at my school. "It's going to be hell," she warned me. It wasn't quite that, but I quickly learned what she had meant. Between continual administrator and teacher turnover, a typically impoverished Delta population, and a physical environment that made the school feel more like a giant holding pen than anything else, the conditions at my school (like so many others we were sent to) forced me to revise the lofty notions of teaching success I had brought with me. If I could get my classes working and seeing some value in the work they were doing, I'd be doing alright.

Thus, the fall of my first year was, just as we'd been warned, an exercise in trying to stay alive. I spent a lot of that time being shocked at how little respect my students were willing to give me (this wasn't summer school) and how alien my position of authority felt. It took me the bulk of the first semester to even begin taking myself seriously as a teacher.

By second semester, I'd managed to get my students working fairly diligently, and my relationships with many of them began to blossom. With nothing else to do outside of school, even the students that hated my class would drop by before and after hours, for ambiguous reasons. They'd lurk outside the door, make their way into my room and then wander about as I graded, finally getting up the nerve to ask me a question, usually not school-related. Regardless of how they were in my class, outside the antagonism of a classroom setting, they were almost all charmingly immature, sweet kids.

By the time May rolled around, I was sure I would miss the students. My placement, which had seemed just barely bearable for a year, now seemed like an okay place. But a move still felt necessary, if only for a life outside of school. I was living alone in the Delta, with school being the only human contact I had most days.

So I got a job in the Jackson suburbs for my second year. From the very start, the contrast with my first school couldn't have been greater. My school this year is huge, both in numbers and in physical size; we have 1200 students and a new, sprawling building, with a wing for each of the three grades. While my last school was the 99% black school in a de facto segregated district, my school this year is integrated, roughly 60% black, 40% white.

We're also predominantly middle class. When I call home now, instead of trying one home number that's usually disconnected, I have cell phone and work numbers, often for two parents. And when I speak to them, the parents are respectful, eager to work together, and glad that I called them.

I also spent the beginning of this year shocked, but it was at the level of respect that my students did accord me, right from the start. I kept waiting for someone to yell, "Shut up talking to me" or "Get out of my face," but it never happened.

Instead of mere survival, this year's struggle has been in finding the way I want to teach and in getting my students to respect it and learn from it. In many ways, this has been a more frustrating struggle. I've felt as though I'm fighting, even at my resource-rich school, years of teaching that has ingrained in my students the sense that unless they're copying notes off the board and answering worksheets, they're not learning. Or that being asked to explain their answer or to think about why they think something is a waste of their time. The hard thing to realize is that too much resistance to a particular way of teaching makes it an ineffective method, even if I am sure it's the better way, objectively speaking.

In many ways, I imagine that the frustrations of my second year are the same as those of second-years who stayed at the same school. But the one thing I truly regret about switching schools is losing those relationships that I had built over the first year. This year, I strove harder to preserve a professional distance from my students, maybe because they weren't disrespectful from the beginning. It worked, but as a result, I don't feel as close to these students as I did to those from last year.

Still, I'm immensely grateful for the bizarre journey that the last two years have been. I may not know a lot more about how to teach, the plight of Delta youth, or the what's wrong with suburban public education, but the little I have learned has changed me in ways I'm still figuring out.