Math is a big dog.
Analogy borrowed from Elaine at Dan Meyer’s blog
So I’m teaching Algebra 2 this summer. Man, is it tough.
This is the cushiest teaching job: pretty chill boss and students who will at the very least not defy you every step of the way. Yes, there are the complainers, but there are also the most determined kids you’ll ever meet. (And the geniuses, don’t forget them.) I’m only a few years out from high school, I know these kids have only frustrated me 1/1,000,000 of what others are capable of.
It is summer. I can’t say I would be super happy in their place. (In actuality, I did go to summer session a few times and I was none too pleased.)
As I approach the final week of this six-week science program, I just feel spent. I love these kids a lot, but wow, they demand everything from newbie teachers. Everyone knows in the back of their skulls that teaching well is difficult; but with my string of activity failures and boring half-arsed lessons, I know it’s more than knowing your stuff and churning out lessons. It’s also getting up the next morning to face another day of over a hundred ways to fail. I’ve failed so many times in more ways than I can list: on a personal level with my students, on an intellectual level regarding the material (I was never fully in love with math to begin with. I really wish I was enthralled by every mathematical intricacy.), and on a professional level with timeliness and effort.
But I know I tried my damn best.
Anything that I do, I will try to do it with the best of my ability. If I can’t do that, what’s the point? And with teaching, you’re going to fail a lot.
From Samuel Beckett, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Reading math education blogs was really inspiring and helped me make (ahem, copy) more activities than I could ever have thought of on my own. They also encouraged me to start looking at math with a different perspective. While I lost my fear of algebra after taking it a few times, my fear of calculus still looms over me. But beginning to see math as a way to make sense of the world, rather than a set of formulas and scary symbols, was really exciting. With my limited teaching experience (none), I wasn’t able to carry-over the best lessons from my favorite blogs. (Or more specifically, make something that loosely fit my curriculum.) That is what disappoints me the most.
As students, we can tell who the best and worst teachers are (as long as our criteria is reasonable). But something I’ve gained from this is a sense of “I see what happened now”. I’ve had so many moments of, “Wait, didn’t this happen with other teacher I had, too?” These are moments I specifically remember, even (or especially) with my most beloved teachers, of failures to communicate a concept clearly or failure to gauge understanding effectively. But these failures are acknowledged and learned from by these veteran teachers, while mediocre teachers would let them slip by unnoticed.
It comforts me to know that even the most experienced and well-loved educators fail sometimes, too.
I am still unsure of my personal path from here on out; the continuous lesson plans and exam-grading made me forget I actually had to go back to school in the fall and decide what the heck I’m going to do with my college major. Rather than worry about my own future, I worried about the next day, the next week. In some ways, teaching was an escape from the inevitable decisions I now have to face. For these six weeks, my decision had already been made. I was a teacher.
It’s almost time to go back to the “real world”.
But today, I have a date with some final exams.
:)
