Reservations

Monday, my student teacher from Cameron arrived.

There are days that I hope are not repeated while she is here . . . The kind of day when I might have said something like " it is a good thing breathing is automatic" referring to a particularly lazy child.  Or the kind of day when I manage to lose the copies of poetry,  use the wrong key on the tests, and crash the grade program all within an hour.

Honestly, those days don't happen that often, but I have a few 17 yr old students who truly acted 13 or perhaps even 9 today.  I know this girl is cute and nice, but I don't think those boys had a hope with her, certainly not when they resorted to poking each other so they could have my attention during a round table close reading today.

I also have reservations about turning over my class to someone I have known for 8 hours.  Who knows?  She could be Ann or she could be Dr. Andrews.  I think she will be more of the Brenda Brown type actually.  Time will tell.  For now she is watching.  Maybe in a few days, she will try her hand at some of my calm classes and work up to my high maintenance kids.  We will talk about what I am teaching and what she wants to try teaching. It will be fine, but It is odd to think of someone else doing my job for me.  Today, I tried extra hard to model only good things.  Tried is the important word in the previous sentence.  It was a crazy day because I was also trying 3 new strategies I learned in a reading class Saturday.

Probably most of all, I want to tell this kid, "Run to the mountain."  I am sure she knows about state mandated tests, poor salaries, unsupportive parents, blah, blah, blah. But she only knows about it in theory.  She has all these really cool lessons dreamed up that might work in an AP class or a reading for pleasure class, but not so much in a class with a big state test at the end.  Does she know that parents will call her at home and scream?  That her car will be vandalized?  That she will spend her years cleaning desks that have been decorated with drawings of a penis?  That her day is not over when the bell rings but at 11 when she is finished grading?

I don't think I was that idealistic when I started teaching, but back then I spent more time on things that let kids think creatively.  We used to have time for novels, the Utopia project, more time on poetry about living life, more discussion, more time in the moment of enjoying lit for the sake of beauty and pleasure.  Now it is make as many things fit the state test as we can and then try to squeeze the rest in at the last week.  At the beginning, I had no grand illusions of saving the masses, but I did help a few connect to the pages around them

I know.  I really do care.  You are right.  I do care what becomes of the boy I stood next to for an hour so he couldn't sleep and the girl who is abused and . . . and . . . I care that they become closer readers and more analytical and better at that damnable test.  I do.

I do like it when I teach.  Today was good because we learned something new and we learned fairly well.  I just don't know that this is what I would have chosen if I had only known then.