Sea of...

It's day four of being sick in Northern Indiana, and let's just say it's been a struggle. I can think of a million things I would actually enjoy doing right now: tubing, sledding, ice skating, building a snowman, but alas, I am too sick to do anything fun.  Yesterday, I was practically too sick to do anything that involved thinking. I didn't even go to church today, which if you know me, rarely happens. My ass is always in the pew on Sundays! However, for everyone's best interests, I decided that it would be best if I stayed at home.

So for the past few hours I've been working on my COMP, planning out centers for my classroom, reading articles, and contemplating life as a teacher.  I read an interesting article today on FB about how to make sure your best people leave (http://www.ragan.com/Main/Articles/Top_10_ways_to_ensure_your_best_people_will_quit_47779.aspx). Yes, you read that correctly. It was a great article, and it discussed the kind of climate that makes good employees frustrated.  While it wasn't geared towards educators (because, I mean, who really thinks of us as professionals-note my sarcasm), it hit the nail on the head. I've been in a funk for the past month or so.  School spirit and school morale is pretty dismal right now (insert a lack of fun), I'm feeling a little used and abused (insert unappreciated, #7), and I'm feeling completely constricted by what I can and cannot do by my technology limitations (can I please get my router back? #8).  In short, I'm fed up and frustrated.  I want to move forward, but I feel stuck, and I feel like my kids are stuck because I'm stuck.  Not a good combination.

See, I love teaching. Ask any of my former students, they'll tell you how much I love teaching.  I also happen to be pretty good at it. Except right now, I kind of feel like I'm not doing as good of a job as I could be. Actually, I know I'm not. I want to open up the world to my students, let them spread their wings, find value in what they're learning, but lately it feels like I've lost my way.  I've had glimmers of it in the poetry slam, the connections my students made with R & J and their idiotic impulsive decisions.  Glimpses, however, are not enough. I want a full-fledged movement like I had the first year I did a service learning unit on the Rwandan Genocide and my students created a dynamic black and white magazine about what they learned. Talk about authentic learning. I miss having time for students to create poems about the masks they wear and being able to make actual masks! It was quite a sight to see all those symbolic pieces hanging from the ceiling. Yes it was messy, but it was worth it.

I hate that for whatever reason, education has seemed to have forgotten that students are people. Yes, they are children, but they are people. Last week one of my students stood up and said "dang, who decided that we needed to sit all day at school?". What a great questions! Lord knows, I'm the one who takes walk breaks at all day in-services because I feel like I'm going to die if I sit in that chair any longer. But it's "sit in your seat", "be quiet", "stop moving", "put that food away", "give me your electronic device" all day long for most of these kids and we wonder why they hate school. And we want them to perform on a standardized test? Sorry people, but this is a different generation, and at a certain point, we have to realize that or we're going to keep running into a brick wall.  We need to start caring about the right things, instead of things we think we have the right to control.  Kids are kids and they're going to test the limits. Sometimes, they're going to make horrific choices that we don't understand, but it's our job to help them do better. It's our role as educators today. Like it or not. And many of us can't keep doing it alone.

We need to start having real conversations about mutual respect, authentic assessment, authentic experiences in the classroom, student accountability (firmly believe in this) struggles that come with implementing theory into practice, reaching today's students, figuring out which disciplinary issues matter, and which ones honestly only matter to us. It's time for reflective practice. I'm in it for the long haul, and I plan on teaching other 18-20 year-olds to commit their lives to this amazing profession (even with all this b.s. legislation).

I'm starting with myself, and I'm starting by getting rid of the negative energy around me. It's bringing me down, and I can't let it do that. I just gotta do me, and if that means surrounding myself with only a core group of people again, so be it.

On a different note, here's a great poem from the poetry slam we had in January. Sorry about the rocky video job, but we don't have a class for that...