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I’ve been putting off this blog post for a while because I feel like I could write a dozen pages for every day I’ve spent in the classroom. Trying to condense everything I’ve experienced into a few paragraphs, the process of selecting the events I deem to have been the most important – it’s pretty intimidating. So I’m not going to think too much about it (as best I can), and I’ll just give a brief overview of the past two weeks.

To begin with, I don’t have “the students” or “the kids” anymore. Those were my standard verbal references for the first couple of days, but now – somehow – they’re “my kids.” I’m not sure what else I can say about that. It’s an immense thing to think through.

The first week was pretty rough. We started off with about 40 kids in the class, and as the week progressed, we were pushing 50. This is 1) strictly illegal and 2) taxing in every conceivable way. Hackneyed though it may be, that old saying “get knocked down seven times, get up eight” kept running through my head – but not necessarily in a positive way. I wasn’t just getting knocked down, I was getting TKO’d, sweat, blood and teeth afly. I mean, each day really did feel like a physical assault. The students knew I wasn’t entirely confident in my abilities, and they responded accordingly. I hadn’t yet gotten any rudimentary feel for lesson planning, and there were times when my own anxiety set my kids off like sharks after blood. Each day I would wake up enthusiastic, get absolutely railroaded during my instructional time, and then gradually work up a modicum of confidence again before I went to bed – only to be similarly wrecked the next day. It was rough. It was really rough.

I have never considered quitting – given the person I am and the significance this undertaking has developed, it’s simply not an option – but last week, I worried about the person I might become after two years of that kind of punishing, incomprehensible failure.

The problem, though, as I came to realize – with not-insignificant guidance from my fantastic advisor Mahaliel, was that I wasn’t being myself. I was trying to be some sort of archetypal teacher, the proto-teacher I’d mentally developed from my own years in school. But I wasn’t modeling my behavior after my favorite teachers. Rather, I was the bland sum-total of every person who’d ever stood in front of a white board and passed out assignments. As a result, I sucked. I really did. I sucked, and I wasn’t myself.

After that realization, I went into this week with a completely different mindset – though I was even more tired from hours spent planning better lessons, I started each day listening to happier music and getting into an enthusiastic and determined mindset. Before, my mindset had been “okay – just make it through. You’re tougher than these kids.” The truth is, though, I’m not tougher than these kids. If it comes down to sheer tough, I lose. These kids have seen things that are absolutely, unfathomably foreign to me. But I came to realize that these kids don’t necessarily need me to be tough – they need me to care. I need to be tough about some things, sure – I need to keep on them until they reach their full capacity for achievement, and then I need to push them even harder. But they don’t need a badass who’s interested in maintaining a perfect, silent class and firing off consequences for every minor infraction. That’s not me, and they knew it – whenever I felt my authority slipping away, I would crack down harder and make my voice that much louder. But a lot of these kids have seen mean before. They’ve seen loud. It’s not impressive. What seems to work – judging from this week – is me being a real human being. Not surrending control of my class – keeping that line firm and inflexible – but not being a capital-T teacher all the time.

That’s not to say I’ve got everything figured out. I certainly don’t, and I’ve got a long way to go. But last week, I actually said at one point – no lie – “I need silence in this room!” This week, when one of my triumvirate of attention-seekers goes off in class, I address their outburst quickly, quietly and efficiently, and then I go crouch by their desk and talk to them. What’s up? You seem like you’ve got a lot of spare energy today. Are you bored? Does this interest you? Could I get you a different story, maybe, that might be a little more challenging? What are you interested in?

Our advisors tell us all the time that student-teacher relationships are critical, and it sounded like every other dry piece of advice we’ve received – something that sounded nice on paper, but didn’t translate into my class. Only now am I beginning to see how absolutely crucial those relationships are. When I can pull Javier (not his real name) out in the hall and tell him that I, too, got bored with my reading assignments in high school and offer to make him copies of one of my favorite short stories – that’s the difference between Javier presenting a major behavioral issue and Javier developing his very real intellectual curiosity. When I pass Esteban on the street after school and he comes up to shake my hand and says “Hey, Mr. C!” I know that I’m doing something - no matter how tiny – better than I did last week.

I still don’t know if my mind has completely wrapped itself around how profoundly different my life is now. I think I subconsciously hold the full realization at bay. I’m still forced to confront it in glimpses, though – like this Thursday when I had one of my problem students out in the hall, pacing, frantic, explaining how much he hates school, as one of my very best students threw up into a trashcan nearby due to morning sickness.

It’s moments like those when I can’t help but think, you – you, the kid I have known and have been all my life – aren’t a kid anymore. You’re a real adult facing very, very adult challenges, and if you’re anything less than that same adult you are now posturing to be, you – and your kids – will fail. It’s an honor, it’s a challenge, it’s a thousand different things that I am not prepared to confront yet will anyhow, trusting my previously untapped reserves of inner strength and my deep care for my kids to see me through.

This has been a long entry and my thoughts are off in all directions, so I’ll close out with some statistics.

The average score on my class’s pre-assessment was a 27. Two weeks later, the average score on the mid-assessment was a 66.

It’s not perfect by any means, but they’re getting there. I’m getting there.