Time to Reflect

I started this on June 21st, but didn't have it completed until after I returned from a 3-week road trip.

The school year is over.  Graduation happened last night.  The summer has officially begun.

It usually takes me a day or two to really get into holiday mode.  The end of the school year is particularly frantic and fraught with stress.  Graduation night is usually an emotionally draining experience: there are bittersweet farewells to former students and then there's the post-ceremony catharsis (and adult beverages) with colleagues.  So I am not used to relaxing yet; in my still active mind, the feeling of the need to be doing something - grading, lesson planning, obsessively checking email - has yet to dissipate.

In this strange time window, where I am physically but not yet mentally on vacation, it is time to reflect on the past 10 months in the classroom, and it hasn't taken me long to come to this conclusion:

I sucked.

Or, to put it in more British terms, I was pants.

["Pants", by the way, is being used as an adjective.  A predicate adjective in this case.]

I had realized this a few weeks ago when another batch of essays arrived on my desk full of the same errors, the same limp, vapid analysis, and the same lack of literary understanding as the last lot of essays.  Last night, many colleagues (reflective, genuine, and not untalented educators) were coming to the same conclusion.  Not that they also thought that I was pants (maybe they did), but they, too, also experienced an incredibly challenging year seemingly filled with more failures than successes.  I was not the only one who expressed that this had been the hardest year of my career.

My classroom management was poor, my students' work showed little signs of improvement, and I clearly did not connect with my students on the level to which I was accustomed.  Most of my students continued to willfully resist reading, and I did not inspire them.  And if I'm being completely honest, there were some students that I was glad to see the back of as they surged out of my classroom on that last day.  For many of them, I am sure the feeling was mutual.

As a team leader and department chair, I failed miserably in ensuring that our curriculum revamping would be complete by the summer: it wasn't.  Not even close.  Ever the introvert, I retreated to my classroom to grade papers instead of joining the team for lunch, thus neglecting the relationships I had built with my amazing department members.  I was not a good teacher, and I was not a good colleague.

So here, of course, is the horrible paradox of reflection: it is an inherently useful practice that often makes us feel useless.

Then I remembered what I, in a weary, final fit of passion on finals day, told my students yesterday.

You made it.  You are sitting here in this classroom and you didn't give up.  You could have, but you didn't.  Many of you had to deal with significant challenges to make it this far, and I have to tell you, I find that inspiring.  Maybe you didn't end up with the grade you'd hoped for, but the grade you got in this class is not in any way a reflection on your value as an individual. 

(It wasn't as eloquent as this, and it sounded rather trite and cliched when I said it, but you get the idea.)

Additionally, I recalled what, for the last year has been my mantra in the classroom: you can only succeed unless you fail.  Over and over again, I have assured my students that failure is a good thing and that learning to deal with it is an essential life skill.  The reflection that you do in the aftermath of defeat, in that lonely, hollow place amid the cold ashes of your expectations - that painful process of metacognition - is absolutely essential when it comes to growth and learning.

The irony here, as you will have noticed by now, is thick.  Wallowing in my own inadequacies, I was not doing the very things that I require of my students.  I, a grown man, was incapable of doing something I expect from a teenager.  And so, I wondered, what would I tell myself if I was one of my own students?

You made it.  You stood in front of the classroom and you didn't give up.  You could have, but you didn't.  You had to deal with significant challenges to make it this far, and I have to tell you, I find that inspiring.  Maybe you didn't end up with the results you'd hoped for, but the performance of your students this year is not in any way a reflection on your value as an individual. 

On reflection, then, what were my "significant challenges"?

Halfway through the year, I started implementing a new, standards-based grading system that focused on assessing students on what they can do, not what they can recall, and ended the system of punitive grading.  It was a massive, seismic personal philosophical shift, and I knew it was the right one, but I struggled mightily in its implementation.  I did my best to guide my team (in our first year as a 9-12 ELA department) through a textbook pilot and adoption process as well as starting the new curriculum writing process with the establishment of a broad and comprehensive vertical vision for our department.  It was very, very difficult to do, but it was essential.  I wasn't successful, but it's not complete yet, and I know we're moving in the right direction.

I'm used to pouring everything I have into my classes, but because these challenges consumed me I probably had less to pour as a result.  Small wonder, then, that I struggled like a first-year teacher with everything else in my classroom!

I will return in August, refreshed and ready.  I am ready to put right the mistakes I made, and, most importantly, I am prepared to persevere in doing the things I know are difficult but nonetheless pedagogically - and morally - sound.  It is amazing that after all my efforts at teaching my students about failure, it was my students who taught me my most important lesson yet: that failure is not a sign that you are on the wrong road; rather, it's a sign that you are on the right road, but you are going to have to work harder to stay on it.

Yes, this year was a challenge.  But the struggles will count for nothing if I don't embrace one final, difficult challenge: practicing what I preach.

So here's to reflection, pants and all!