I Love Teaching, Even When It Doesn't Love Me Back
At 2:45 pm, the students have already left the classroom. The door is slightly ajar, just open enough to let the teenage energy dissipate from this great green room. A whiteboard displays equations, diagrams, and words in different color markers. Desks once rigidly paired are slightly misaligned with untucked chairs and random doodles on them. The random handout, pencil shaving, and returned assignment lay on the floor. This teacher sits at his desk, still decompressing from another day of more than a hundred students over the course of eight periods. Two large stacks of ungraded papers and lesson plans hide his hands from the casual passerby.
He’ll need a few more minutes. He’ll shake it off. He’ll do this again tomorrow. He’s passionate. He’s tired. Millions of other teachers get it.
I get it, too. It’s February. There’s a whole litany of reasons for why children and the adults charged with caring for them are tired. After 100 days of having to with and for one another, we all need a cool-off from one another. Kids won’t sit down and pay attention to a 25-minute lecture? Adults won’t do it, either, and we’re paid to do that (kinda). Kids don’t want to wait for the bathroom? Teachers have to either wait until their schedule says they can use the potty or beg a colleague in the hallway with one foot in the door to hold down the fort.
Kids aren’t prepared for class? How’s that lesson plan from two years working out for us?
But I can’t shake the feeling of the cumulative exhaustion so many of us have in this work. No school CONTINUE READING: I Love Teaching, Even When It Doesn't Love Me Back | The Jose Vilson