I was driving home from school today and I felt this sense of relief that it was the weekend and I wouldn't have to go back for two days. Then, immediately thereafter, I started to feel awful that that's how I feel about my job. I guess no one really likes their job, but mine makes me feel physically sick. I'm stressed out and preoccupied with work all the time. I'm crazy overworked because I feel like I have to work that hard to keep from failing even more miserably than I already am. I don't even think I can write about how big a failure this week was. It's still too fresh. I've lowered my standards this year so many times to try to keep ahold of my personal life and sanity, but I never seem to be able to lower my standards enough to feel like a success. My daily routine consists of days that are utter failures and days where I'm able to coast. I don't feel like I ever have good days. Occasionally, something good will happen, but I just can't get that excited about it. Today I had a student turn in homework today who was absent yesterday. That's one of my biggest successes all year. But then I look at the mountain of failing students and I get depressed again. I want to see them succeed so bad, but so few of them are, and I don't know how to push them and get them to work without it becoming a miserable power struggle. And I'm a pushover. That's what one of my students said I was to another teacher. And he was right. I am.

But forget all that. Forget me feeling sad about being ineffectual or watching them fail. I'm mostly sad because I realized today that I hate my job. I felt awful all week because I had several really bad days in a row, but today went fine. It was nothing great, but nothing awful either. And I just felt sick about having to go back. Every morning, I arrive at work, turn off my car and sit for about a minute reluctant to get out because I know when I do, my day will start. When lunch comes, I'm scrambling so much that I consider myself lucky the days I have a chance to eat a granola bar. When my prep period finally comes near the end of the day, I breathe a sigh of relief because I finally have a moment to sit and space out after being on call nonstop for the last several hours. When school gets out, I feel relieved that I no longer have to be on the spotlight and the low pressure work can finally begin. That's the work that isn't constant deadlines and frantically running to and fro for what feels like no results. Of course, the low pressure work has other ways of breaking my heart- when a student who has been working really hard bombs a test and I have to give them an F, and not just any F either, but a low one. Or when a student doesn't turn in homework yet again and thus digs themselves even deeper into a hole.

Then there's the extra insult that comes from your failures being altogether too public. My failures this week were of the exceptionally public kind, which leaves me feeling inferior not only in my own head, but in the minds of the people who have to decide whether or not to rehire me. No one likes to be judged, especially when they know they're going to come up wanting. Even before I started teaching, I thought I'd probably get a pink slip when those came out, but back then I thought it would get rescinded. Now I'm starting to become more and more convinced that it's going to stick. Part of me even hopes that it will so that I don't have to make the tough decision of whether or not to stay.

And then there's another part of me that gets so frustrated by the waste of it all. The waste of two years of education to get a credential. At least the masters stays with me. Then there's the waste of BTSA, the program to help beginning teachers and try to keep them from quitting. There are a lot of people trying to help me stay with this horrible profession and I appreciate their support, but I'm starting to feel guilty about wasting their time. The chances of me actually being there next year are starting to look slimmer and slimmer as I become more miserable and look even more miserable to the principal. She's going to tell me how my evaluation went on Monday, but I have a pretty good idea of what to expect. I expect she'll sugarcoat it a little (you don't want someone to know they're fired when you still have to work with them for 7 months), but I still have pretty low expectations for the whole thing. I have to. The debacle of the first evaluation was so bad and caught me so by surprise that I could barely function for the next two days. The principal mentioned offhandedly a few of the highlights and when I started to cry, she softened the blows a little and decided not to show me the notes she had taken. I shudder to think of how bad those were. If I keep my hopes low for next time, it hurts a little less.

I'm writing the most about being a failure because that's what stands out the most in my mind, but there are other aspects of my job that hurt too. I hate that it's consumed my life. I barely have time to hang out with friends, take care of my health, deal with my car that beeps deafeningly several times within my 15 minute commute because I have a leak in my coolant tank. It's been doing that for weeks. I don't have the time to fix it. Even when I set aside time to avoid work, I still think about it constantly. When someone asks what I've been up to or what's going on in my life, it's only my job. That's it. That's all my life is lately, is this horrible horrible job. It's bad to be consumed by something, but it's worse when you're being consumed by something that makes you feel awful about yourself. I hate this job. I hate it. My mom tries to cheer me up and it only makes me feel worse. She tries to tell me I'm good at what I do, but she doesn't know. She doesn't know how horribly I'm failing every day I go in. She doesn't know how miserable I feel when I have to reconcile her praise with the truth of the situation.

Ok. I'm done with this. I'm only making myself more and more miserable. I'm going to try to procrastinate and ignore my problems for a little while. They'll still be there, but I won't have to worry about them until they wake me up in the middle of the night and I can't fall back asleep (sadly, a common occurrence lately).

My evaluation

So I fretted about my evaluation before I met with the principal. She seemed pretty laid back and it felt kind of like she was on my side (to an extent, you know), so I was still pretty nervous, but not so bad. I spoke with some other people who said that they've been trying to rehire the math department for years but just haven't been able to because the quality of teachers was so low. That made me cautiously optimistic. I mean, the people they were unable to rehire before mostly just gave their students some worksheets and then went to sleep at their desks. One of the reasons our district is under no child left behind sanctions is because there was not enough direct instruction. I take my job pretty seriously and actually do teach, so I became a little less stressed out. I mean, I expected criticisms and critiques, but I was thinking it would be something they could work with, at least for another year.

I knew the principal was coming in today during my third period, but we hadn't decided on a particular time last week when we set the date. She said she could come in during the beginning or the end of the period. Since I didn't have my lesson plan put together until this morning, I wasn't really able to let her know what would be the best time. She had other people scheduled during this period also, so I figured it was already decided by them anyway. So I didn't know exactly when she'd be in, so I scheduled stuff at the beginning of class and at the end of class that would be good for her to watch. I put all the classwork where students are supposed to work in the middle. So when does she show up? Of course, right in the middle of the classwork. She stuck around for a while to see if I actually taught anything, but after 20 minutes or so she had to leave. She said as she left that we could reschedule. Oh yeah? For when? She had to have the evaluations finished this week because she's going on a cruise for a month starting like next week. So does that mean she's going to evaluate my direct instruction on Thursday, when my third period doesn't meet? Or on Friday when all of my algebra 2 classes are having a test? Or maybe she could come in to algebra readiness. It's a good class, but they don't learn well through direct instruction. They can listen for 5, maybe 10 minutes tops. They learn by getting the work done, and since they have no homework, class is the only time they can work. That's what the whole class is- working on problems. Or better yet, she can come into my 6th period, aka my algebra 1, aka the class of 37 with 3 students passing. Actually I'd rather she didn't since her seeing that class would automatically mean I would be fired, so I'd rather be fired with no evaluation than with a negative one.

So it's kind of like knowing a test is coming and preparing for it and knowing it wasn't going to be great, but you were probably going to pass, and then being told you can't take the test. No evaluation means no evidence that they should rehire me. So I guess I'm fired.

For a while I wasn't sure if this was the right job for me. Slowly I think I've realized that I do kind of like aspects of it. In fact, I think I'd like it more and more as time goes on. I have been liking it more and more in fact. So I didn't realize how upset it was going to make me to be fired, but right now I am miserable. Utterly miserable.

Evals

I'm being evaluated by our new principal next week. Should be fun. I'm totally getting fired. :(

Teacher advice

Because I am a first year teacher, I have been getting all sorts of advice from all sorts of places. I've been trying to go to staff development courses which are full of suggestions also. Some of the advice is honestly just beyond me. It's more than I can do right away. My support provider through BTSA (Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment- it's a program to help new teachers out, but we also lose our credential if we don't complete the course within 5 years of receiving our credential) has made a few suggestions that I'm really trying to implement, but I don't really understand what I'm doing. She's told me to try to organize my students and gave a few suggestions on how to do that. Frankly, I wish she had given me suggestions on how to organize myself. I have papers strewn everywhere on my desk. I grade some classes through checkmarks, some through stamps, some through papers they turn in. I frantically scurry around the classroom trying to give credit to those who have finished what they're doing and sometimes I don't get to everyone. Then I have to count on my students being organized enough to keep their papers until I check them off the next day. It's pretty chaotic. I'm going to try to implement a folder system like she suggested, but the main point of what she was trying to drive home is that I have to choose a way I want their papers to look and then hold them to it. The problem is that I don't have any better sense than they do of what I want their assignments to look like. I'll have to buy some milk crates and manila folders and come up with some ideas, but that sort of set up work is really hard. It takes creativity about something I hardly understand. I'm sure it will make my life about a million times easier, but I'm a little intimidated by getting it started.

As I was saying before I got sidetracked into describing one particular type of advice, there are a lot of different kinds of advice I've been getting. A lot of the advice is really helpful. As I said before, some of the advice is really hard to follow. Some of it isn't entirely practical. Some of it is teacher specific, and the people giving the advice don't even realize it. Something I think I've realized is that every teacher has their own style and what works for them won't necessarily work for you. Or perhaps more accurately, there are many correct ways to teach and some of them will fit for you and some won't. For instance, here is a short list of advice I have been given from some of my coworkers:
-When you have a real troublemaker, you just have to publicly humiliate them. Otherwise they will be trouble for the whole school year. It also sends a message to the other students not to act up.
-Never have a public confrontation with a student. It will only escalate any issues and then their friends will start causing you trouble also to defend the person you called out.
-Sometimes you just have to shout to get your kids' attention.
-If you keep your voice low, the students will quiet down to hear you. If you raise your voice to talk over them, they will only get louder.

There's plenty of other advice I've been given as well. Not all of it was as obviously contradictory as the above examples, but it still falls into the same category of "works for you." There's no guarantee it'll work for me, and a lot of teachers don't even realize that. I don't know entirely how to classify the difference between generic good advice and "works for you" advice. It's one of those things I'll probably realize eventually. Until then, I gotta keep listening to advice and implementing all that I can. If it fails miserably, perhaps it was "works for you" advice all along.

Fighting

Yesterday I saw my first fight on campus. I generally stay out in the parking lot where my classroom is, but we had a union meeting at lunch, so I was in the more central part of campus. At first, our meeting was interrupted by screaming outside - a lot of it. Someone went to check and it turned out there was a huge fight. They called security and we holed ourselves back up in the room. I never went outside so I didn't see it, but it was kind of awkward knowing what was going on outside as we tried to discuss whether or not to give our principal a vote of no confidence (yeah, big things were happening. Incidentally, that whole discussion is moot since she was fired today. Yeah. Totally incompetent. So big changes going on at the school. That's stuff for a different entry though). So I never saw that fight, but it was weird being so close to one. Then after the meeting ended, I went outside just in time to see another one start. This one was a lot smaller, with a lot fewer spectators (in part because I think people were distracted by a small tiff going on a few feet away between a security guard and another student). But back to the two students that I saw fighting. It really wasn't anything like I thought. Fights never happened at my high school, or my grade school either, although it looks like they might be kind of commonplace here. This is part of the reason our principal got axed- security is a mess. So my inexperience with fights made me think there would be a lot of punching or shoving, not kicking someone's head as they laid on the floor until the person was dragged away by his friends. That kid was restrained by his friend, but then no one restrained the one getting kicked and he got up and started going after the restrained one. If I got kicked in the head, I'd be done. Hell, give me one shove and I'd back off. I guess that's not the mindset of the fighters though. A teacher and some other students managed to grab the unrestrained one and pull him into a classroom to keep him away. I stuck around for a little bit watching the other altercation between the security guard and the student because a lot of crowds of students were still there. I don't think anything was happening, but they were waiting for something to happen. Which means they missed out on the fight that actually was happening, but I'm starting to get the impression that that was kind of minor.

I went back to my classroom feeling pretty shaken up and dejected. Fights are not exciting. They're awful. It's a horrible thing to watch a person hurt another human being. It's a horrible feeling knowing what's going to happen to those kids. It's a horrible idea to think of what will happen to them if they try to do that off of school grounds. What will happen to them after high school? And what about the kids who aren't even involved? Is this what their learning environment is? How do you feel safe in an atmosphere like that? And if you don't feel safe, how do you learn?

It's really a minority fighting, but these fights are starting to feel more and more common. Our security staff really is great and they contain the issues really well, but these issues keep sprouting up. It's really unsettling. It really shook me yesterday after I saw it. I had to call Steven just to talk for a minute and cool down. In the end, it was probably good that I saw my first fight yesterday. It made me a little more prepared for the fight that broke out in my classroom today.

Yeah. just as I'm all shaken up about fighting, one breaks out in my class. Between my students. Who are now getting suspended over this stupid crap! And it was over almost nothing too! I don't even know really what it was about, but those two were friends. Maybe not so much anymore, but they were. And they're sweet kids too and now they're out. Who knows how many days they'll be suspended, but I know I won't be seeing them for a little while. I saw it escalate too. I tried to calm them down, but clearly not enough. One of them was furious and one of them wasn't upset at all. The one who wasn't upset probably just didn't like being yelled at. She wasn't upset at all, but she's the one who made it physical instead of just shouting. She's my student in a group home. She got moved here from Hemet because she told them if she was in a group home down there, she would just run away. It turns out she tried to run away from this one last Monday, but couldn't get a ride so just headed back. She's a nice kid. She rushes through things and tries to just get them over with, right or wrong, but she's nice. I don't know what the consequences for a suspension will be back at her home. I hope she's ok. I would hate to see her relocated again.

I will say security was excellent about getting to my classroom immediately. It was within a minute that I had two security guards at my door separating the students and escorting them off individually. It's nice to see something running smoothly in the school for a change. Just a few days ago it took 15 minutes for anyone to respond to an emergency situation in the class next door. The teacher kept calling the office (because we're not supposed to call 911 ourselves for some reason) and no one picked up. Apparently they were all at a meeting together. NOT acceptable. It wasn't until the teacher sent a student running to the office that they got a response. Perhaps that situation was the tipping point for our now ex-principal.

I never really thought of our school as a high risk urban school, but I'm thinking now it really is. I kind of didn't realize what I would be getting into. Also, as a new teacher, I didn't realize all the thing that weren't the way they were supposed to be. yesterday, it kind of all hit like a ton of bricks all the things that were more than just difficult challenges for a first year teacher. Everything as a first year teacher is hard, so I didn't realize that some of the hard things weren't actually supposed to be that way. I knew from the beginning that our class sizes were ridiculous and that it was unusual to have students switching classes up to a month into the school year. I knew these were the main reason the principal was under so much fire. Here are some of the things I didn't really realize: I'm supposed to have a clock, and it isn't that hard to get one. This many fights aren't supposed to break out. I should have a site orientation. Every room should have a first aid kit. Internal gates on campus should not be locked. There shouldn't be 172 AOPs (classroom helpers). Teachers should get a chance to review fire routes. Staff meetings should be a forum to talk to administration. My walls should not be in disrepair. Graffiti should be painted over. Students with referrals should not be sent back to classes. New teachers should not have 3 preps. There's about a million other things that should not be the way that they are here. It's so difficult to be a new teacher in this kind of environment. I guess it'll be a story for 10 years down the line. "my first year teaching, I had no idea what was going on! Everything was a mess, and I'm thinking to myself, 'well this sure is hard. I guess it's true when they say the first year is the worst.'" I'm sure I'll be able to refine my description of what a debacle this school year has been for Mt Eden after I've had another year or two under my belt and can see this process done right. I gotta say, I'm looking forward to a new principal with the hope that this one won't suck.