Teaching at 3am

If you ever want to make a teacher mad, flippantly imply that we have it so easy only working 188 days a year.  If our days started at 8 and ended at 5, and existed only Monday through Friday, I could understand the argument a bit better, but nights like tonight happen so often that a straight 40 hour work week sounds downright inviting.

I left school at 4:15 after a short-for-me nine hour day where even the “breaks” I have are filled with non-stop work. I headed home to pick up my husband and go out to a much needed dinner.  Our entire drive was spent talking about our days, mainly venting about the frustrations and worrying about how we will ever escape the stresses of our jobs.

James and I don’t normally take our phones in to restaurants with us, but I did as I wanted to check my ridiculous basketball bracket while we watched a game during dinner.  As we sat down at the bar, I noticed I had two emails from students whom I had sent home with unfinished work for the first time all year. It was all I could do not to respond to those emails but I set my phone aside and focused on my husband.

Mid-way through dinner, I picked up my phone to see if by some crazy chance I had picked Notre Dame over Bama (no such luck), and I see I have a third student email.  While I quickly read and responded, my husband pointed at the TV, which displayed the news headline about Biden’s pledge to increase cancer funding and I was reminded of the need for me to be fully present with James right here, right now. I set my phone down, hoping my encouragement for the one student will get her through her frustration and reiterating the directions I gave to the other multiple times at school will get him through completion.

I didn’t check or respond to emails again until we arrived home when I was able to celebrate with the one student who finally got the assignment done, and I bit my tongue and responded to the other who was asking more questions about the assignment even though he had not worked on it when he was supposed to, and hadn’t stayed in at recess like he was supposed to, both times that were designed for me to answer questions and provide additional support.

By 8, my husband went to bed but I intended to stay up for a bit.  Sitting on the couch reading the news, I thought I heard a great horned owl outside.  As I fumbled with my phone to get my bird app open, another email popped up, this time from a parent. 

I opened it to find a lengthy letter complaining about several instances during the past week when their child hadn’t been treated as they thought he should be at school.  While I was only involved in two of the incidents, I was the only teacher they sent the email to (as far as I could tell).

I stopped putting on my shoes, abandoning my owl quest, and typed five drafts of a response before settling on one.  I thought about not responding at all, but I knew it would bother me anyway, so I might as well deal with it. I know how parent emails fester for me, and dealing with it head-on was the best course of action for saving my weekend from overthinking the entire thing.

But at 10:30 I am still awake and I frustrated with my evening.  I’m thinking through all the ways I could have handled the evening better to preserve my personal time. Yes, I could turn off my emails on evenings and weekends, but there are things my colleagues and even administrators communicate that are time sensitive.  I could choose not to respond to my students, but my goal all week was to help them through their struggles and I didn’t want to leave them in the lurch just because the school day ended.  And the parent email I probably could have (and maybe should have) just forwarded on to my principal, but an upset parent bothers me and I’d like to restore peace as quickly as possible.  I’m not sure I achieved that, since I am still wide awake obsessing over it, but I don’t want them to feel even more ignored.

I’d like to say nights like this are rare, but in truth, they are more common than they should be.  I wish I could convince parents that there are very few instances when an email should be sent to a teacher during the evening or weekend unless it is to sing his/her praises, but that suggestion will never fly.  Parents protect their children and they get as riled up as we do when they feel we’ve done their child wrong.

And I wish I could get kids to see all the time I am there at school pouring out my time and support so that they might not expect it later, when they finally come around to doing the task, but again, that is a pipe dream.

So, I will apologize (again) to my husband in the morning and I will vow to leave work at work but I know I won’t.  I can no more stop thinking about the kids than I can can stop breathing. 

But, when I am on summer vacation and someone tells me how nice it must be to have my whole summer off… well, don’t expect me to agree with you. Those are the only days when I am ever truly shut off from my classroom. And if I am to remain a passionate, caring, involved teacher, I need those days as much as I need the air I breathe.

I was encouraged at the beginning of the year to keep a journal, to document the daily experiences, joys, stresses, successes and struggles of a teacher. I was encouraged to somehow capture what it was like to be a teacher, especially now. And I did, for a while. Until life seemed to get in the way. I cruised along, writing about the moments that felt like the epitome of the teaching profession as well as those struggles that felt like the reason so many of my colleagues are looking for other careers.

And there were days when I meant to write, but the ups and downs of my personal life set claim to those moments, reminding me that every hour isn’t just about the kids, or the needs of their parents, or even the needs of my administrators, but that I am also a wife, a sister, a daughter, a mother, and that those people need me, too.

The balance has become more and more difficult in the past month, when my personal life took an unexpected and severe turn and I found myself struggling professionally to put in the effort, the energy and the enthusiasm that ten year olds need out of their fourth grade teacher. I found myself short-tempered with colleagues and declining involvement in school activities that I once readily participated in because my personal life needed more and there is, after all, only so much to give.

But it was yesterday, that I realized how difficult it is to ever truly separate the personal and professional life of a teacher. Sitting in the oncologist’s office with my beloved husband, as the doctor helped us navigate the truly unexpected and devastating diagnosis of Stage 4 metastatic melanoma, she used the phrase, “between a rock and a hard place.” In that singular moment, I was two people. Completely and utterly two distinct people. My husband’s wife was struggling to catch her breath, swallowing the description in an effort to wrap my mind around all that was happening to our world, our life and the implication that the road forward is far from clear or easy. And at the same time, the teacher in the same chair thought, “Ooh, an idiom! I’ll have to remember to tell the kids about that one!”

It sounds absurd to even type it. It seems ludicrous that I even thought it, but that, in every sense of it all is exactly what it is like to be a teacher. I could not possibly find a better way to explain it to anyone else.

I wrote sub plans on Thursday for the following three school days. It’s a far more difficult task that it might seem, especially when I knew my students would have three different substitute teachers. My dear colleague and co-teacher repeatedly assured me that the kids will be fine and that she will handle anything that comes up. My administrator assured me that it was all good and everything would be handled, and not to worry. But I can’t not worry. These are my students. These are the ten years olds whose parents email me at ten o’clock on a Thursday night with a concern. These are the precious children who were all but robbed of a normal school year last year because of COVID, virtual learning and social distancing. These are the children who I have worked all year to close gaps, move the academic mountains and fight for additional supports for. These are the children who depend on me to make sure they know the things they need to know before moving on to fifth grade.

In the past month I have been absent from school more than I have in any other school year and I know my absences are far from over. I will continue to stress about leaving meaningful sub plans and not just “busy work”. I will continue to worry about this student and that who do not do well with changes in routine, changes in teachers. I will continue to worry about all the responsibilities that come with my profession – the meetings I am mentally absent from even when I am physically there, the colleagues who need my collaboration or my feedback that will get little more than blank stares and minimal input. And I will worry that I am not going to be enough for my students, that I will fall short of engaging and exciting and that my lessons will be little more than opening a TE and teaching the next page. I worry.

And I worry about my husband. Every second of every moment since we first realized there was a problem, I have worried. I worry about what our next steps will be and how we will manage everything and I worry about being enough for him during this time that he needs my everything.

And so while it seems absolutely absurd to think that while this world-renowned oncologist is delivering life-altering news to my husband and me, my thoughts jump to my class and my kids and the damn essential standard on idioms that we have been working on for months, it is not absurd at all.

This, in every single ounce of it, is exactly the life of a teacher. And this duality, these precious people on both sides, leave me feeling like I am indeed stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Standards based grading has made such a positive impact on my teaching practices this year. When I started reading Ken O’Connor’s book, How to Grade for Learning last year, I felt validation for my teaching philosophies. As my district has begun putting these practices into play this year, my list of benefits for standards based grading abound. I have felt better equipped to help struggling students, as I know exactly what standard they need more time and support with. I also now have short standards-based assessments that I can use to not only track the whole class’ progress, but also those I am giving specific interventions to which directly guides my instruction and allows me to teach what is necessary and to the students who need to hear it.

In addition, the emphasis on feedback to guide learning instead of vague letter grades has really been transformative for me. I have provided feedback in the past, of course, but never to this extent or depth. With the focus on growing toward a standard, my feedback this year is far more specific and meaningful for students. (This could also be said for parents, in that they can have a much clearer picture of where their student succeeds and struggles with the standards delineated on the report cards and progress reports, but since I teach fourth graders, I really want the students themselves to understand, internalize and use the information for growth.)

But it wasn’t until our first conferences that I realized that while I was giving written comments on work providing praise and areas for improvement, it was only during our conference conversations that I was telling families and students what tools they might take better advantage of. I had been remiss in providing this information to students in a more timely fashion on their work. I had been providing positive comments as well as areas to continue working on, but I had failed to ever share with students how to improve in those areas. To that end, during our last large writing, I created a very quick and easy Google doc that allowed me to provide feedback to students in a more organized and meaningful way than simply writing comments on their papers. I wanted a better way for students to see, “Hey, this is what I am good at!” while also helping students see mistakes as just areas for growth and learning to occur and to have specific ideas on how to improve in those areas. The half sheet I created was received so positively by students that I wish I had thought of it a very long time ago. I have always provided compliments as well as suggestions in my written feedback, but somehow this form really helped my young writers see their successes in a more concrete and visible manner.

Each one of the columns provides critical, specific information to students (and parents). I make a bulleted list of “wows!” so students can see specifically and clearer areas they did very well in. The bulleted list of “now” steps I intentionally keep short, to just a couple suggestions, and I take these items directly from the rubric – from what would have moved their score from a “2” in one area to a mastery level of “3”. The last column I use to list specific ideas, resources and tools that will help a student get better at those “Now” steps. Sometimes that means reviewing notes we took, using a checklist more thoroughly, working with a partner, doing extra practice examples or slowing down and double-checking.

The “Wow, Now, How” form has become my go-to for feedback. So far, I’ve only used it for writing projects, but I intend to increase its usage to reading assessment tasks and spelling and grammar as I can, too.

I sat staring at my phone in complete disbelief. I had been casually reading the information to an interested friend when I just stopped and stared. “It must be a typo,” I mumbled more to myself than anyone else at the table. “It absolutely must be.” But of course, it wasn’t.

When they say the administrative assistants are the glue that hold offices together, the description could not be more accurate, especially for an elementary school secretary. I’ve been an admin assistant before, and I know many of the behind-the-scenes work that goes on to keep an office running smoothly. At an elementary school, the front desk is the first line of defense against classroom interruptions, never-ending paperwork and deadlines, materials, copies, student needs, teacher needs, administration needs – the list could go on for days.

Barb is Wonder Woman in my eyes. She not only keeps everything running, she does it so well that we take for granted how much she handles every day. She makes endless phone calls to parents, to other buildings, to schools. She sets up meetings, she arranges for materials, she orders supplies, she keeps track of who needs to sign what and get it turned in by when. There isn’t a parent of any one of our students who hasn’t been positively impacted by Barb’s capabilities, whether they know it or not. She is the gatekeeper to our principal and the one who I am certain helps him manage all the duties of his position more efficiently.

I have repeatedly asked her for information she has already sent to me. I have numerously started a conversation with her with the words, “I know you told me this already, but remind me…” I have asked her for help with situations that are not even hers to deal with and never once has she been short with me, or anything less that pleasantly helpful. Even more than that, she will go above and beyond to lighten my load when hers is already plenty deep and heavy.

We just learned that she was leaving us a couple days ago. Our district is fortunate enough to still be employing her – she is far too much of a talent for us to lose – but she will no longer be managing our building’s office. We were all so very happy for her promotion, but so deeply worried at our own personal and professional loss. And it is personal. Barb is more than just our school administrative assistant, she is a friend to all of us.

So it was with complete shock that I sat at the table in the restaurant reading the job posting to an interested friend. The shock was obviously not because of the posting itself, I already knew she was leaving. The shock was over the posted salary. $13.41/hr. In a crowded restaurant with great music and lively conversation all around me, I sat shell-shocked. $13.41 an hour? That’s it? I could not for the life of me understand how all her talent, all her responsibilities, all that she pours into that position is only worth $13.41 an hour. Now, maybe she makes a bit more as she’s been here a while, but if that’s the starting wage, whatever she is earning, it isn’t half enough.

The job description made the position seem like anyone could do it. “High school diploma. Three years office experience. Typing. Microsoft knowledge. Blah, blah blah. Pleasant personality.” Umm, where was the “ability to nimbly juggle eighteen tasks at once with ringing phones and irate parents standing in front of you and a kid throwing up in the sick room?” Where was the “Experience working with stressed, forgetful and sometimes scatter-brained staff who will depend on you for their every need most days?” And most importantly, where was the salary to compensate for that?

Hours later, I’m still reeling from the shock and realization that for all these years, she has done this job for pennies. Working in education is “never about the money” people love to say, but my goodness, the money does matter! I will hope and pray that we are able to find someone half as capable and wonderful as Barb. I will rejoice in the fact that she will still be around, just at central office, where she will continue to juggle a million things and she will do so with a smile and a pleasant laugh, like she does, with nothing phasing her. But I will shake my head at the world we live in and the appalling salaries we pay some of our most vital people.

$13.41. She could have made more by asking if you wanted fries with that.

At six this morning, my phone started blowing up with text messages. A thread of my colleagues had turned overnight from hopeful snow-day enthusiasts to disappointed teachers bound for another day of teaching. As one after the other cited neighboring schools that were closed, or difficult road conditions or even the challenges of getting out of personal driveways, I got up and showered and headed out the door.

I am certain, not just from the text thread, but from my own usual desires, that I am the only one glad to be at work today. Second only maybe to summer vacation, snow days are unplanned but much appreciated days off to a teacher. For all the evenings, weekends and early mornings we put in, a call or text at 5:30am saying we don’t have to work that day is a gift straight from the heavens above.

But today, I needed to be here. Today may be the only time I am thrilled that my superintendent did not call off school like the districts around us, because today I have a long overdue IEP.

Today, a student who has been on our radar for additional support services since the very first day of fourth grade and, through conversations and paperwork, for years before now as well, will finally qualify for additional and much needed support. Many factors contributed to the delay, not the least of which is her own attendance record, but our school’s less-than-streamlined child study process has also made it feel more difficult and frustrating to get some students more help than we can feasibly provide in our own classrooms.

There is work to be done to determine, create and provide appropriate and meaningful supports for all of our students, but for today, I will, (perhaps silently or at least away from my colleagues) be ever so grateful for the silver lining that the snow didn’t cause more of a problem on the roads and that our team is going to be able to officially start providing help, support and at-level academic instruction to a much deserving young girl. Today might be a bummer for staff that wanted to say in pj’s, but it is an absolute and unquestionable win for this struggling student.

She came up to me when I was in between reading groups to ask if I had any more revising checklists. My mind wasn’t in the game, I was still making notes about the students that had just read for me and so it was with a somewhat dismissive tone that I replied without even looking up, “Did you check the basket?” She confirmed that yes, she had already searched the extra papers basket. I stopped at looked at her. Of course she had. She is one of my most responsible and independent students. I paused and gave her question the time it deserved. “We haven’t reached the revising point with our opinion writings, yet,” I replied, wondering what her motivation was for wanting the checklist.

“I don’t want it for my opinion writing. I’m writing a story during my writing station and I’d like a revising checklist for that story so I can make it so much better.”

I had to just sit there and soak it in. She was working on a story during her independent writing station and was eager to do the writing process?! Unheard of in my fourth grade room. They are “first and done” kids, wanting to only draft a story and then share it with the world. Working through the very important revision process was always a challenge with them. I was impressed with this student’s initiative – as I always am with her. “Of course! Of course you may have a revising checklist! Write me a note so I remember and I’ll print you one during my planning time.”

At the end of the next reading group, she returned to my side. “Mrs. Koehn? You know those blank books you made for our summarizing practice when we read Edward Tulane? There are some extra ones in the basket. Can I use one of those?”

“Of course you may! Can I ask what you are using it for?” I was anxious to see what creative use she was going to use the booklet for.

“I want to keep practicing my summarizing with the book I’m reading during Read to Self. I really liked how we did that at the end of each Edward Tulane chapter and I want to keep working on it with my own book.”

At this point I had to just lean back in my seat and truly soak it in. These are the moments, aren’t they? The ones that we as teachers live for? These little moments when a student takes control of his/her own learning and soars. I praised her highly, and even took a moment to let her share with the class what she was working on during her station time.

It wasn’t but a few short moments later when I had to redirect a different student for off-task behavior during his station. He struggles every day to stay focused and use his time productively. He has been particularly struggling with a couple concepts but won’t work with a partner during stations and he won’t spend extra time using the resources around him to learn the materials either. I’ve been working with him as often as I can not only to provide remedial instruction but to keep modeling and showing him how he can learn the material and what options he has, but he would much rather hide in a corner and mess around.

Wouldn’t we all?

Well, no. My first student and a few others like her wouldn’t. The more I think about it the more I know that this hurdle is one of the biggest I face year in and year out. All the other challenges of teaching aside, I have longed for better answers on how to motivate the unmotivated kids. I have read books, I have attended a seminar, I have read blogs on the subject, but I fail to find a sustainable answer. I know it’s a complicated quest – no two children are the same and even the same child will be motivated very differently on different days or with different tasks. But it’s a hurdle that could have life-long implications. Helping students learn that intrinsic motivation (even if it has to start extrinsically) could help them be more productive as a student, employee, parent, etc. later in life.

So, here I sit, wondering how can I bottle up the work ethic and desire to learn that my first student has in abundance and share it with my apathetic, unmotivated kids who struggle just to get through the day sometimes? I wonder if I was wrong for holding her up in front of the others as an example – is that too much pressure? Did I just reiterate to some of my other students that some kids just “get it” and some just don’t, even though that is far from the truth? I could easily dismiss the task from my list of classroom responsibilities and say it is a skill that should be taught at home, but I know I can’t relinquish it so easily. The onus is on us all, especially when parents are struggling to teach it in the home.

I don’t have an answer, just a desire to do better. I know I need to start by making sure that all my students feel capable and loved, no matter where they are at in their learning journeys. I know my classroom environment needs to be a safe place to take risks, to admit ignorance and to own our mistakes. And I need to remind myself that this is a process that will take time, even if I wish beyond wishes that I could snap my fingers and make it happen for all my students today.

For whatever reason – proximity to the door, its initial flowering beauty, its reasonable price point – I have received an orchid many years from students as a Teacher Appreciation gift. And they are beautiful. They are so delicate and frankly, so unusual in their growth needs, that they have a first-impression appeal for sure.

The fact that I receive them year after year does not translate into a windowsill full of beautiful orchids, however. I have a few of the little plants left, with huge green leaves, but in all my years, I have never once successfully gotten an orchid to rebloom. Not once. In fact, there are years when I have struggled to keep mine alive.

Until now.

I have absolutely no explanation for it. I didn’t do anything different with the pot, the lighting, the growing material. I didn’t sing to it, or speak in soft whispers. I didn’t change my watering habits or place it in a particularly well-lit area. But a couple weeks ago, I noticed a different sort of stem growing up out of it, and sure enough, buds! Now, today, I have beautiful orchid blossoms.

I took a moment to take a picture. I emailed the student who gave it to me (I happen to remember this particular one specifically) and shared the exciting news. (I am certain, being a middle-schooler now, that she was not in the least impressed or caring, but still.) And I have thought about it all day long.

Looking around my classroom, I feel similarly about some of my students. There are days when it seems like the lightbulbs are just going off all around. Or sometimes it’s just one particular student who seems to “suddenly” get a concept that has previously been quite a struggle. I oftentimes have no idea what was particularly different about my instruction, the materials, the environment, the supports, – any of it – that made the lightbulb go off. But I’m always so thankful that it did.

And now, at the end of the day, when the lights are being turned off, and the classroom door closes behind me, I look back and see the orchid in the window with its white blooms and I wonder if today I did anything to make a child bloom. Was today a day when I had the water, the light and the soil just right that someone grew as a learner? Was today a day when I said it just so, or wrote it out in a new way, or modeled or explained or provided a new example that made a student grasp something they didn’t before?

I sure hope so. I sure hope the lightbulb moments in my room are not nearly as rare as my re-flowering orchids. I may never really know, but I’ll continue to provide the best lighting, just enough water and a new pot when this one gets too small and I will hope and pray that my students will continue to grow and blossom like this little plant.

The last week (or two) have been hectic. Any educator knows that no matter how organized, prepared and equipped you are, the end of a marking period is always met with the chaos of collecting last-minute turn-ins, late night grading and hours pouring over comments on report cards. The last two years have added in the workload of gathering materials for kids headed to quarantine and collecting and catching up those returning from weeks of virtual learning (which, even at its best is far from the instruction they receive in school).

In addition, the end of a marking period also necessitates the beginning of a new one and is more often the case that I feel it should be, that means generating, finding, collecting, copying and planning for lessons and materials for the upcoming weeks. As we continue our shift to standards-based grading, this means the added work of creating assessments to support our standards in addition to modifying the lessons used to teach them.

Which is a long way of saying I’m exhausted.

Today, the day before Thanksgiving, I have been at school since 7am to work on my lengthy to-do list. My colleague urged me not to come in, to just “take the time” for myself, but there’s no way. I was awake until late last night with ideas and plans running through my head. So far, in the four hours I’ve been at school, I have finished entering grades and comments for one of my two classes. I had hoped to only stay for the morning, but I haven’t even begun to prepare my lessons for next week.

And while I can appreciate the importance of reporting student progress and providing meaningful comments for guardians, I really want to get to my lesson planning. It feels, lately, like that’s what I have the least amount of time for, despite it being the most meaningful work I should be doing. I would love to set aside all other priorities and just focus on creating engaging, purposeful, differentiated lessons, but if I can’t assess student learning then I can’t adapt my instruction to meet the needs of my learners. And so, I need to spend significant time working on those assessments.

Sigh. It’s the role of an educator, I know, and while I don’t want to be completely removed from the process, nor do I want someone so far removed from the classroom to decide for me what I will assess and how, I do wish I could free up some of this energy and time for the things that I really need to be focused on. I recently contacted a literacy coach for some support as my team moves forward into our next set of essential standards and she responded with several resources I could consider and use to guide me. It’s all helpful, but it doesn’t diminish the work load on my part in getting the assessments done.

And, to boot, we are continually assured that all of these assessments and standards will be “in flux” and “evolving” which, again, I can appreciate, but does little to motivate me to put significant work into supporting these chosen standards with engaging lessons and materials if they are perhaps, likely to change.

The struggle is real, as they say. And today, a day when I should be at worst raking leaves and at best playing cards and eating an early helping of pie, I am at school, putting everything I have into my profession. Maybe, just maybe, if I keep my nose to the grindstone, by late this afternoon I will actually get into designing some of the lessons that are playing about in my head. We can only hope.

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.

I was super excited to teach ELA this year. I was even more excited to try out some new strategies for helping the students with their writings. I had put together cute but informative slideshows; I had broken down the writing process into what I thought were truly manageable pieces; and I had started the year with a rather open-ended narrative writing, believing most kids would find success with this genre. I thought a narrative was a great way to take what we were learning about themes from our reading standards and apply it to our writing as well.

I was wrong.

The students struggled. They got frustrated. They ignored examples, ignored lessons, ignored checklists, ignored feedback and some turned in truly dreadful examples of a narrative.

Last week, we began the process anew, but with the added element of writing a fairy tale. I hoped this would provide us with a lot of practice using quotation marks and paragraphs along with the skills we had started working on for first narratives. I also hoped that writing fairy tales would be engaging enough to help pull in some of the students who didn’t seem to care much about this genre.

During the brainstorming and planning stages, I was met with lukewarm responses. A few students were excited, but overall, I wasn’t optimistic that I had lit any kind of fire under my more reluctant authors.

Today we began drafting. I reminded the class that these would not be good drafts, they were merely a starting place for all the work we would do to make our tales amazing. Most of the students had learned this through the first process and were at least a little more understanding of how much work was ahead of us. But for today, we just focused on starting to put our ideas on paper. We pulled out our fairy tale elements page to refer to and we looked to our graphic organizer that we’d already filled in to help us guide our story along from opening to problem through a solution and hopefully, to a happily-ever-after resolution.

I normally wander throughout the room while the students write, but today I didn’t want to be too readily available for questions, spelling assistance or any guidance. I wanted them to put in some independent work first before looking around the room for their Fairy Godmother to come help them. As I watched my little authors, I heard one of my more reluctant writers who had really struggled with his first narrative writing, mutter, “Oh, no. Not yet!” I asked what that was all about and he shared with the class, “I was about to write something about someone that would tell a thing, but then I thought Whoa, Whoa, WHOA! NOT YET! And I decided to add more details to add suspense first!” It was such an exciting moment for him (and for me)!

Moments later, another student asked if she could stop writing for a few minutes and go look at some fairy tale books for inspiration. I applauded the idea, reminding her that referring to exemplars is always a great way to be inspired! She went straight to my crate full of fairy tales and dove into some books. Another student finished his draft (for today) and was already reading some fairy tales. He exclaimed, “I just got a great idea!” He put the book down, grabbed his drafting notebook and added to his story.

Only time will tell if we end up writing happily forever after, but it’s obvious we have already grown as authors. For me, even if the conventions and processes are lagging, if there’s excitement, we are on the right track! To see these students inspired and enthusiastic and eager to improve today not only lit them up inside but reassured me, their ELA teacher, that we are indeed making good progress! The moral of this tale: if you believe in them, the kids will often surprise you!