On Failure, Part 5: It's Not About You

This is part of a two week series on my five biggest failures and five biggest successes as a teacher this year. This marks the end of the first half of the series. "On Success" will begin on Tuesday, March 24th and continue through Saturday, March 28th.

Of the many failures I've had this year, the worst is something I've yet to conquer over six years of teaching. I still take everything too personally.

I'm still trying to understand exactly why it is I let things bother me to the point where it affects me in and out of school. I do know at least a few reasons that contribute to the problem:

1. I care deeply about this profession and the job I do. I am so invested in what goes on in the classroom that when a student is not as invested as I am--or not invested at all--I can't shake the feeling that it's a personal shot at me. I think I wear my heart on my sleeve--it's pretty obvious to anyone who's been in my classroom for a few days that I put a lot of work into what I do and I really do care that my students learn something valuable.
2. I don't shake things off easily. If something bad happens, it takes me a while to shrug it off. I'll carry the frustration with one bad class or incident into the next period, which just makes things worse. I'm not good at hiding my feelings, so my most attentive students quickly pick up on what's going on and it affects them. Of course, this just makes me more frustrated, and I just try to focus on the work.
   
3. Poor sleep or lack of sleep affected my mood and focus. I don't like to admit it, but I'm well aware of how much or little sleep I get can determine the course of a day. Unfortunately I'm still working on getting more quality hours of sleep.
4. Everything I've written about this week.

I know I'm made huge strides over my career in terms of taking things less personally, but I've still got a long way to go. I don't know what it will take to get past this--or if I'll ever get past it. I just hope I keep trying to get better.

In a Sentence
Don't take anything personally, even if it's meant that way.

On Failure, Part 4: Stressing Out

This is part of a two week series on my five biggest failures and five biggest successes as a teacher this year. This week I am focusing on failure, while next week will focus on success.

I don't think I anticipated how stressful this year was going to be. I'm not really talking about the numerous difficult challenges I've faced at work, because those have been there every year I've taught. It was outside the classroom that I really failed to thrive, which made everything more difficult. I failed to find enough outlets for stress relief this year.

Moving
My physical and emotional transition across the country last summer was incredibly stressful. I'm a seasoned veteran when it comes to moving--I've moved every year for the last six years (sometimes more than once in the same year). So when I say this move was the most stressful yet, that's saying something.

Finding an apartment was more challenging than ever, as we were restricted to areas with good public transit accessibility while trying to search from 2000 miles away. I had crunched the numbers to figure out how much rent I thought we could afford and still maintain a similar standard of living, and thought I knew exactly what I was doing. We ended up in a great apartment and location, but the rent was significantly higher than what I had come up with, which lead to a much bigger problem.

Money
I totally took for granted the low cost and high standard of living I had enjoyed in my five years in the Rio Grande Valley. My girlfriend and I have cut back everything to save money, I've sold almost all of my earthly possessions, and we've learned to appreciate getting by on far less (which is certainly a good thing).

It's not having to live more cheaply that makes things stressful; I actually enjoy that challenge. It's the very real possibility that I won't be able to pay the rent or other bills, or won't be able to pay off debts and save for the future. I hate how money has put a strain on my relationship with my girlfriend, how many pointless arguments it has fostered. It's taken most of this year for the constant tension about money to subside, but I still stress about it privately even if we don't fight about it any more.

Even though I've learned a great deal about what's really important to me this year, the high cost of things has made if difficult for me to indulge in anything I would normally do for stress relief.

No Relief
If I'm not at work I'm basically a shut in, because I can't afford to take advantage of many of the things I came to Boston for--access to tons of live music, theater, museums, major sporting events, great restaurants and bars or travel to nearby places. Even the local cafe is no longer a cheap respite for a few quiet hours out.

I used to watch every UFC PPV in a great local pool hall in the RGV, but the cover charge alone here could have paid for the entire night out before. I was even interested in taking a mixed martial arts class at a local school before I saw what the monthly cost would be. The same goes for a gym membership.

Ironically, one reason I moved back to the East Coast was for the opportunity to see my family more often to help me get away from things. Yet the increased cost of living has been so dramatic that I haven't been able to afford to visit them any more often than I did when I lived 2000 miles away.

I have learned to appreciate little things, had more time to blog, and found out I can do a lot by myself throughout this year. I just wish I could strike enough of a balance to make my tough job a little more tolerable.

In a Sentence
Find outlets for stress relief and always strive for a true work/life balance, no matter what.

On Failure, Part 3: Teaching a New Subject

This is part of a two week series on my five biggest failures and five biggest successes as a teacher this year. This week I am focusing on failure, while next week will focus on success.

My sister asked me this past weekend: "Are you going to make things easy on yourself and actually teach the same thing next year?" I argued that I had been teaching Algebra I for four years, with occasional forays into other areas (especially this year). Nevertheless, it made me reflect back on how difficult it had been to teach a full Algebra II class for the first time this year.

In Texas, Algebra II wouldn't be much different than Algebra I because the standardized test (the TAKS) forces teachers to spend a lot of time reteaching the same concepts students were taught the year before.

In Massachusetts, in a charter school where I had a bit more freedom and less extremism in response to test scores, my Algebra II class was allowed to be something closer to what it should be. Unfortunately, I think one of my biggest failures this year was that I haven't done a good job teaching it. There are a number of simple reasons:

1. I haven't taught a great deal of the material before--in some cases, I haven't done the problems since I was in high school. There were times when I felt like a first year teacher again in this situation.
2. Having no experience with teaching these concepts means that I didn't have a wide range of engaging, innovative strategies prepared. My resource books didn't push far beyond basic Algebra and I didn't have an exhaustive list of online resources that covered topics like these. Sometimes it was an exhilarating challenge, but mostly it resulted in me beating myself up for perceived incompetence.
   
3. Frankly, I taught a lot of topics very poorly. I spent a lot of time fumbling through lessons, realizing I had left something important out or failed to notice a simple way to explain a difficult concept until after I had done so in the most difficult way possible. There have been many days where I've to reteach something from scratch, telling students to basically forget what I said previously. It's embarrassing.
4. I've held back some of my brightest, most advanced students. There are some kids who are ready for Pre-Calculus if not AP-level work, but my lack of familiarity with the material makes it hard for me to prepare something ahead of time.

It took most of the year for me to settle into this role to a point where I'm confident that I'm preparing students for college level mathematics. I can't shake the idea that if I had some time to sit down and design the kind of activities I'm known for, I'd love to go back and try again from the beginning.

In a Sentence
Teaching a new subject is an incredible challenge no matter how much experience you have.

On Failure, Part 2: Student-Teacher Relationships

This is part of a two week series on my five biggest failures and five biggest successes as a teacher this year. This week I am focusing on failure, while next week will focus on success.

The one skill I've prided myself on over the years has been my ability to connect with students and build strong relationships with them. It's one of the reasons I started this blog, and the thing that keeps me going through the many, many difficult times.

Unfortunately I feel like I've never been less successful at building relationships than I have this year. It was sincerely heartbreaking and depressing that by mid-year, I couldn't name a single student that I had made that kind of connection with that makes this job so worth it. Even now, after making some significant adjustments, I can probably count on one hand the students for whom I make a difference in their lives (and vice versa).

I think one major reason is that I forgot how good I am at one-on-one conversations. I am very frank and honest with students most of the time, partly because I'm not very good at hiding my emotions but mainly because my students respond to it so positively. This quality allows me to pull a student aside and level with them in a way some teachers just can't do. I don't claim to have some sort of special charm or magic words that get students on my side--it's just that my good intentions are just so plainly obvious that you'd have to be more stubborn than I can be in order to ignore them successfully.

I can't tell you how many times I've cringed at a well-meaning teacher engaging in the most blatantly patronizing teacher-speak you can imagine with a student they truly cared about and wanted to help. You can see the pain on the students' face, their eyes literally or figuratively rolling back in their head as if this was indeed killing them as much as it was killing me.

What I did wrong this year is that while I didn't abandon my honesty and general manner of speaking to students, I didn't pull students aside for the effective one-on-one conversations that helped me build so many solid relationships quickly. There were so many times where I told myself, "If I could only get a few uninterrupted minutes with this kid, I can turn our relationship around..." only to let myself be carried away by various other concerns we teachers deal with every day.

This is a major failure because the student population at my school absolutely, positively needs this kind of intervention more than most schools. It's more difficult than it has been with any group I've encountered, as many of these students are so hostile to and disconnected from what we're trying to do that it would be easy for us to throw in the towel. I'm disappointed in myself, because to some extent I feel like I had thrown in the towel for most of the year before yanking it back at the last moment (but still have it ready to throw in again at a moment's notice).

In a Sentence
Building strong student-teacher relationships is what really makes a difference in students' lives--and yours as well.

On Failure, Part 1: Systems and Procedures

This is the first part of a two week series where I will discuss my five biggest failures and five biggest successes as a teacher this year.

I'm ashamed to admit this, but sometimes I fail to follow my own advice. You will find few bigger advocates for well organized classrooms than yours truly. Yet perhaps my biggest failure this year has been to abandon many of my most tried-and-true systems and procedures, and each omission has had far reaching consequences.

Notebooks
I have used my own version of the Interactive Student Notebook since I began teaching. Notebooks are highly organized with numbered, dated and titled pages. Building up to, responding to and creating things for the notebook is a central part of each class period. It makes it easier for students to follow challenging topics by having everything in one place. If students are absent, they can get notes and assignments from my "master" notebook . Studying for tests is as easy as saying, "The test covers everything we did from pages 10-20."

I basically made notebooks an afterthought this year, when my current students needed that structure more than any group I've had before. Attendance is sporadic, and even many of those that come to class regularly are completely unorganized. My shelves are now full of dust-covered, rarely used notebooks. Most importantly, it made getting class started excruciatingly difficult.

Do Now
I didn't abandon the Do Now, but I failed to hold my students accountable for it until recently. In years past, students had the first five minutes after the bell to complete it. I would then check it for completion, with each student receiving either a check (100) or zero each day (this would be tallied into part of their grade). Afterward we would go over the question together, and it would lead directly into whatever I was teaching that day.

The result of me not checking it for the first half of the year was that I got incredibly frustrated at how difficult it was to get class started every day. Nobody did the Do Now, so students had no idea what I was talking about when I attempted to go over it. Since this was the logical lead-in to the rest of the lesson, we were doomed from the start.

I wish I had a good explanation for why I didn't do it, but there's no excuse for it. My best proof of how important this is is that as soon as I went back to holding my kids accountable for the Do Now, I immediately saw an improvement across the board.

Student of the Week
I don't know where the idea came from, but recognizing a Student of the Week for each class period has been a standard part of my classroom since I started. It's designed to recognize an extraordinary effort, huge improvement or consistent excellence either academically or behaviorally.

There was no tangible reward attached to this honor, although I did usually drop the lowest grade for students who achieved it in a given grading period. I could tell you that students were very much interested in getting it and extremely excited about receiving it.

One reason I abandoned it this year was that my school has weekly community meetings in which students, teachers and staff give each other beads to recognize the same kind of things I would normally recognize in a Student of the Week. Of course, I quickly realized that I wouldn't be able to recognize all of the students I wanted to, but it just became something else that fell by the wayside. I could make an excuse about how awful behavior was across the board early in the year, but that's exactly why I needed to recognize the students who were doing a great job. It's one of my single biggest regrets.

In a Sentence
Stick with what works!

Special Series: "On Failure" and "On Success"

Over the next two weeks, I'm going to try something a little different in an attempt to help other teachers. I spend a lot of time reflecting on what I do in order to become a better teacher, and I'm launching a special series where I will look closely at both the positives and negatives of my school year so far.

This week, starting on Tuesday and ending Saturday, I'll be detailing my five biggest failures as a teacher this year. I made a lot of mistakes that made this year harder than it should have been, and it will help me (and hopefully others) to reflect upon what I could have done differently.

Of course, I wouldn't be doing myself any favors if I was to dwell only on what I did wrong and not on the good things as well. So from Tuesday through Saturday next week, I'll balance the negative with my five greatest successes as a teacher this year.

I can tell you that it was much easier to come up with five ways I've failed (I actually came up with so many more that I had to stop myself) than to come up with five successes. I'm my own worst critic, so of course I tend to think things are much worse than they actually are, but that forces me to constantly strive to improve. In the end, I think my students benefit from that.

Here's all of the entries from both series:

On Failure:

1. Systems and Procedures
2. Student-Teacher Relationships
3. Teaching a New Subject
4. Stressing Out
5. It's Not About You

On Success:

1. Reaching My Goals
2. New Games & Projects
3. Fostering Positive Change in Students
4. I Still Want to Teach Forever
5. Not Bringing Work Home