It’s been a week. In all honesty, this week feels like “normal teaching” to me, which is to say, frazzled, hectic, stressful and tense. The start of the year felt great and exciting and now, the further we move into the year, the more I am bogged down by the frustrations, challenges and obstacles that come with the job.
For starters, I had a student be sent home for quarantining. It means I have about two minutes to help her gather everything she will need and send her to the office. We get together as much as we can, but it still isn’t all the copies, assessments or papers she will need for the time she is at home. Much of it has to wait until a later time, which is unfortunate because sometimes the families aren’t able to return to school to pick things up.
In addition, I am on a committee that has turned out to be a time-suck. I enjoyed the first meeting to the degree that I felt as though my voice as a teacher was heard and appreciated, but the commitment has now turned into far more than I knew and I do not feel even in the slightest that I know how to meaningfully contribute to the process we are engaged in. Having been asked by colleagues about this committee, I have already taken grief that this group is going to “pile on” to the work teachers already have and I have found myself in a defensive spot on a topic and process I have only just now begun to be a part of. This is exactly what I do not need.
The meetings have added stress in inadvertent ways, too. Having only 15 minutes from the dismissal bell to the start of the meeting, and having to get to another building a few blocks away for the meeting, the end of my day was already going to feel rushed. But then a student, one that needs more than most, was having issues. I was trying to have a quick conversation with him before dismissal, but he was shutting down on me and walking away. The last thing I wanted was to send him home more frustrated than need be, but there was literally only a handful of minutes before the bell and he had a bus to catch and there wasn’t nearly the amount of time necessary to decompress with him and to process all that he was feeling. He got even more upset when I said I wanted to alert his stepmom so she might be able to hear his frustrations when he got home. Everything I said made things worse and the bell chiming made me want to scream in frustration. All I wanted to do was sit down on the floor and let him take as much time as he needed to calm down and then to talk about what was upsetting him and the ways we could work through that together. I would have driven him home myself. I ended up leaving things in a stressed, tense way since he refused to talk and there wasn’t time to wait until he was ready.
But, there was a meeting to get to.
So, I left school. On my way through the building, I voice-typed an email to our behavior specialist to see if he might nab this child first thing in the morning and just help him start off on a positive note. As I walked to my car, I voice-typed an email to the boy’s stepmom to let her know. I apologized profusely for sending him home in a mood, but also conveyed my concerns.
On my drive to the meeting, I made four wrong turns. I over shot my turn twice and had to make two U-turns. At one point, I yelled at myself in the car to get my head in the game, but I knew my head was still swirling around this child, and all the ways I felt like I failed him today when he really needed me. Truth is, even if I hadn’t had this meeting, there wasn’t much I could have done differently. His issues didn’t arise until the afternoon and I didn’t even know of them until 3:30. The bell is the end of our time together, no matter what. I don’t have a choice but to put him on a bus.
The meeting added to my frustration. I basically sat through a meeting for 45 minutes to simply tell me I have another meeting next week.
I came in early the following morning to gather the rest of the materials for my quarantined student. I have another who is now going to be home for longer than originally anticipated, so I was really getting two sets of materials ready. As I started collecting the things they would need, I realized that yet again, I was going to have to create the assessments I needed for the third week. As I opened the shared file and stared down a list of 17 assessments, every single one of them had been created by me in the past two months and I spent well over an hour creating the next three assessments so I could send them home with these two students.
My first priority the once the morning bell rang was to connect with the boy but he was absent. It was nearly two hours later when the specialist came in to see if he could talk with him. Even if the student had been at school, I only have 15 minutes at the start of the day for these interactions to occur as the students leave for Prime Time, which is why I had asked for the specialist to make a point to see him first thing. I know the specialist is busy, don’t get me wrong, but I have a student in need. During the 15 minutes I have, I need to serve breakfast, take orders for breakfast and lunch and get attendance entered as well as listen to the morning announcements. In all the training I’ve been in to help kids of trauma, or just to connect with kids, the things I know would really benefit kids aren’t possible because of the procedures we put in place building-wide for start and end of our day.
During my planning period and my lunch (when I already had a room of kids for an extra-curricular writing project we were doing together) I spent the time making copies, making notes, gathering and organizing materials. So much for next week’s lesson plans.
By mid-afternoon, another student was identified as needing to quarantine and the domino effect led to two others choosing to do so. It would take me at least another hour to get all their materials together and down to the office but I had another meeting after school.
The after-school meeting was virtual and for only the second time in my professional career, I turned off my camera, turned off my mic and just listened in the background. The meeting did not get my focused attention at all, but I didn’t feel badly about it. I always contribute to these meetings. I always ask questions and clarify ideas. My colleagues rarely speak up and then later, some are upset about not knowing this or that. If anything, my silence and absence might make others speak up (it didn’t). I didn’t leave school until 5:30, after getting materials together, writing up lesson plans for the coming week and meeting with a colleague to just vet some ideas about virtual teaching should it come to that.
Today brought more of the same. A sick colleague brought unexpected sub plans and students that were unruly. A school performance lowered my class size to 13 total kids for most of the day, so it was a day without new material being taught and while I wanted to catch up with some of the kids that needed help in various areas, most of those students were now home. I had to get set up for virtual learning as well as in-person and throughout the day I had to manage back and forth between the two. I also had to jump in numerous times with my colleague’s class as her kids were running amok with the sub.
It wasn’t until we were lined up going to lunch that it happened. Maybe she just knew how frazzled I felt, although I try desperately to have my game face on and I’m always reassuring the kids that we are problem solvers and there isn’t anything we can handle. Standing in line to go to lunch one of my girls looked at me and out of the blue said, “I’m so glad you are my teacher this year, Mrs. Koehn!” I don’t know what made her feel or think that at that very moment, but it was exactly what I needed to hear at exactly the moment I needed to hear it most.
I didn’t brush it aside. I didn’t downplay the compliment. I thanked her. From the bottom of my heart. I gave her a huge hug and I told her how much that meant to me right then, in that moment.
And that is what I have to carry me through all the rest. That, is the life of a teacher.
Teaching at 3am 