Intense Apathy: An Oxymoron

I shouldn’t have gone to school yesterday. Up until the moment I pulled into the parking lot, I considered turning around and going home. That’s not true. Even as I was making copies and prepping for my first class I seriously thought about asking for coverage and leaving. But I didn’t. Because I am dutiful and responsible, and I do what’s expected of me even on days when my uterus is raging within my body so much that I’d gladly teach class curled in the fetal position on the dirty school floor.

 

I’ve always suffered horrible cramps, which are so intense at times, it feels as if I could faint or throw up. I took enough ibuprofen yesterday to tranquilize a bear, and yet my cramps insisted on crippling me, thumping incessantly against my lower back and abdomen. The painkillers did deaden the cramping to a consistent ache, but that sort of ceaseless discomfort over several hours rendered me highly irritable and short on patience.

 

So when during my 2^nd period class, after an unexpected 4 day weekend thanks to Blizzard Nemo, I discovered that only three of the 25 students in the class had successfully completed 15 pages of reading originally due for last Friday, I pretty much lost my sh*t. It was half my angry, crampy, screaming uterus, I swear. But it was also the frustration that has been building and compounding upon itself over the last year and a half in this teaching position. You see, many of my students suffer from an intense and severe case of educational apathy. (This seems like an oxymoron even as I type it – severe, intense apathy, ha.) This second period class is overwhelmingly comprised of exceptionally lethargic and indifferent learners. More than half the class failed last quarter. On a regular basis, there are only five or six students who complete assigned work. I have been unfailingly kind, understanding, and encouraging to them while at the same time trying to hold a line of high expectations for their learning. That is, until yesterday, when the perfect storm of severe PMS and unexpressed discouragement at how the class has been going stirred together and spewed forth in a four-minute verbal tirade. I must have said at least five times something like “SERIOUSLY?!?! IT WAS 15 PAGES, AND YOU HAD FOUR DAYS TO READ IT!!!” I then made them sit without speaking for the remainder of class to actually do the reading, because…what else could we do? Maybe this was too kind, but at that point, I just couldn’t muster the patience to try to engage with them at all.

 

Is this just me being a relatively inexperienced teacher, or am I right to have difficulty understanding how they can just care SO LITTLE about their own education? How is it possible for me to do my job when I care more about their learning than they do? Why do they have absolutely no sense of urgency when it comes to their own futures and the impact their education will have on this future?? Half the time, it feels as if I am going 85% of the way to meet them…and they still refuse to meet me with 15%. I doubt raising my voice at my students yesterday had any effect outside of making me feel a bit better for the moment. Once the class was over, I just felt guilty for letting my irritability overtake me.

 

I gave my uterus and myself a “mental health” day today. I’ve been laying on the couch under a heating pad watching reruns of “Scandal” on Hulu, which has been surprisingly restorative, because at least I don’t have to deal with the problems that arise when one is the leader of the free world. I’m still dreading tomorrow, though.

Praying for Serenity

Especially since becoming a teacher, I often notice myself unconsciously repeating the words to this familiar prayer. It often happens at night, as I wash my face following a particularly challenging, frustrating, or downright harrowing day with my students. Today was one of those days. And so, I pray.

 

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

 

Accept the things I cannot change,

Accept the things I cannot change,

Accept the things I cannot change,

Accept,

Accept,

Accept.

 

Amen.

Glimmers

It happened today. Somewhere between watching this video in the district’s opening colloquium and hearing the new superintendent’s vision for the year, between printing class seating charts and rushing to retrieve my room keys, I felt it. A sense of hope and of purpose. A tinge of nervous excitement for tomorrow, the first day of school.

On my ride home, I thought about the young people I will meet tomorrow and what I will say to them on our first day together. I want to take advice from veteran teachers to be firm on the first day, less concerned with whether my students like me and more with establishing that our collective priority must be the business of teaching and learning.

I want them to know that I love what I teach. I became an English teacher because I love reading novels and plays. I love writing and talking about the ideas in these works, ideas that transcend social, political, and economic boundaries. When we read, I don’t much care if they can recall the minutiae of the text, but rather that they can dig at what the author is trying to say through the text. In thinking about this, they’ll get closer to uncovering something about our common humanity. I hope they’ll do their best to remain curious about the ideas we discuss together.

And I want them to know that I’m there because I care about their learning, about their journey to becoming the people they wish to be. I could have chosen, could still choose another path. Perhaps even an easier path with more tangible rewards. But instead, I choose to be with them, invested every day in their learning, because I do not think there is any more important thing I could be doing with my life. I am, in every sense of the idea, there for them.

Today, the teacher next door, my friend and a wonderful educator, asked, “How are you feeling about starting your second year? It feels different than this time last year, huh?”

I replied, “Yeah, it definitely does. I’m not nearly as nervous, and I definitely feel more prepared, but…” I was set to launch into my little anxieties and fears about what was to come in the following days.

But she cut me off. “Stop right there,” she said. “Hold onto that, that feeling of more confidence and more control. You’re ready for tomorrow.”

I think she could be right.

A Return to My Purpose

If I’m being completely honest, I feel nothing but an extremely intense and unrelenting sense of dread whenever I think about the start of school next week. This dread gives way to significant guilt, and then a serious anxiety about the path I have chosen and whether it is, in fact, the right one for me. These doubts – of whether I am meant to be a teacher-  have consumed me this past week, in a time when I really ought to be mustering excitement and hope for the coming school year. This is not a good feeling.

Last year was my first as a teacher. Everyone I’ve ever met who is or has been an educator shares with me incredible horror stories about their first year. When I meet another teacher and tell them I have just completed my first year, they invariably give me a look of understanding pity and then try to reassure me that the second year WILL be better.

Despite all of these well-meaning colleagues, who pledge to me that the second year can’t possibly be worse than the first, I still find myself worrying that I simply am not capable of navigating another year with any modicum of success, while also maintaining a sense of balance in my personal life. Though there were small victories last year, overwhelmingly I felt tired, as if what I was doing was not making the impact I had set out to make. In truth, I was often disheartened, having spent hours on a single lesson, only to have a room full of adolescents react to it with boredom (best case) or outright disrespect (the worst.)

In truth, I’m scared to become just another jaded, cynical public school teacher. I see so many examples of this in my current job. There are those who refuse to assign papers in an English class because they don’t believe they should be forced to grade writing outside of school, or those who spend the majority of class time relating to students as peers without addressing the complexities, the wonders, of literature or language. So many of my colleagues approach their students with a preconceived judgment that they are lazy or incapable, that they need to be “kept in line” or given worksheets to keep them quiet. All of this makes my heart hurt, for I know it is not true. This is not the reason I became an educator.

So, in an effort to reconnect with the reason I DID choose to be a teacher, I revisited a paper I wrote in graduate school that attempted to answer a deceptively simple question: What is the purpose of schooling? (As a side note, I think our education system would benefit greatly from a serious reexamination of this question…are we really interested in producing students who can score proficiently on standardized tests, or should we be shooting for something more creative, something more applicable, more individualized?) Here’s a short excerpt from the introduction of the paper:

“The purpose of schooling should be to nurture a child’s inherent curiosity and to foster the development of empathy in each student. In this context, curiosity equates with a sense of wonder about the world and a hunger to learn about how it works. It is a non-judgmental state, characterized by an honest acceptance of one’s position as a perpetual learner. Curiosity, I believe, is innate in children, but often suffocates in school settings that view “learning” as the mere absorption of facts. If students are allowed the space to be genuinely curious about the world and to express and explore what it is that intrigues them, I believe they will develop a love of learning and a capacity to question and problem-solve that is essential to the world.

Empathy can be defined as the ability to understand another’s feelings and struggles. Practicing empathy is a personally held value that I believe should be essential to the work done in schools. If we are to prepare students to become responsible and caring citizens of the world, we must ask them to look beyond their own narrow worldview. We must teach our children to compassionately consider the experiences of those who may be different from them. In considering curiosity and empathy together, it seems the nurturance of one can connect with the development of the other.”

Perhaps if I can cleave to this purpose with ever more clarity and strength this year, this purpose that represents my core beliefs as an educator, I can begin to honor the gravely essential task I’ve been handed – inspiring my students to become more curious and empathic people.