Today, I ran out of fight. I was trying to get a class through a portion of a novel, and everywhere I looked, heads were lowered, eyes were closing. Every answer I was getting was just pulled desperately out of the air. I guess I could have launched into an angry tirade or a lecture about the importance of it all, but I just couldn't. I felt as fragile as spun glass, like any sudden movement was going to shatter me in such a way that I couldn't ever put the pieces back together again. I told them to spend the remainder of the period doing SSR, and I graded the quiz on the section they were supposed to have read.
Most of my students this year engage, or at least they "play along." There are days though, as there are in every teacher's life, when it doesn't click. Lately, because we are having the students read a novel, it's happening more and more. I refuse to believe they can't do it. If they were genuinely incapable, I would have more patience with it, honestly.
What I cannot stand, what is destroying me, is when they can but they WON'T. It is unbearable to me to sit and watch somebody choose ignorance over knowledge. It's never wrong not to know something, but it is wrong to continue to shun knowledge when it is offered to you. Any time you don't take an opportunity to better yourself, you have broken one of the great unwritten commands of the universe - Go forth, do, and learn from it.
And yes, I know they're young. I know they're distracted. I know that apparently, I am failing to make it "relevant" enough despite all my best efforts to the contrary, a fact that continues to depress me. And no, it's not everybody. I can't learn to let go of the ones who do. I can't deny that some part of me envies teachers who just sort make the sign of the cross over it and go on. I am sure their blood pressure stays much lower than mine, that they don't get nasty ripping headaches. I just don't know how to stop letting it affect me so much.
Today, just now, I need to be grading, doing lesson plans, prepping materials for the week ahead. Instead, all I want to do is sit very still and try to pull my pieces back together. Maybe if I can do that, then I can find what it's going to take to try to get up and go again tomorrow morning.
Your students really are listening even if you don't think they are. They admire you,really.
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