A rolling thread where we are teachers

I have this one class that goes badly about 50% of the time and I'm really starting to worry that it's getting too late to turn it around. The kids are super smart but rowdy, like to test authority, and loved their previous teacher, so they push back every chance they get, and I'm reluctant to start coming down hard on them because I know their previous class had a really warm positive vibe and I'm still hoping I can get there. But the reality is I'm not as experienced a French teacher as their previous teacher was, and I'm still getting a handle on what they know and don't know, and so this part of the year is just going to be me trying stuff and seeing if it works - which of course comes across as incompetence to them because they're smart middle-schoolers who live to judge adults. Today's class went really badly, and what's really frustrating is it didn't need to. The activity wasn't bad, I just hadn't quite calibrated it right for this class and I'd left too many opportunities for them to get distracted, and they took all of them.

I wish I were better adjusted and didn't react to bad classes with this panic spiral of "I am a bad teacher and I won't be able to come up with a good plan to get out of this hole I'm in because I am a bad teacher."

It's supposed to be a reflective profession...I'd always take bad days and disastrous lessons home with me. Usually things get better just because things usually get better.

I wish I were better adjusted and didn't react to bad classes with this panic spiral of "I am a bad teacher and I won't be able to come up with a good plan to get out of this hole I'm in because I am a bad teacher."

as an alternative to just gritting your teeth through it, remember your reaction to things can change for the better (as well as your class!) but only YOU can do it -- you need to focus on noticing when the panic spiral starts and shutting it tf down. it's possible, it's work, and u can do it!! :) don't let a job eat you alive. i am here to post this as many times as i need to.

Real bad teachers really dgaf when their classes are going badly.

Thank you all!

LL is right, Lily Dale— and just a reminder that we all have off days, and to be kind to yourself.

Thanks, everyone. I really appreciate the pep talk. I had a talk with the class today - "I'm not happy with yesterday's class, part of that's on me, but part of it's on you, let's talk about expectations," and then switched up my plans for the next couple of weeks, because I can tell they're sick of review, and jumped into a new unit that they seem to be on board with. And it all went pretty well! It's sometimes hard for me to remember that I'm not a first-year teacher anymore and I actually have the skills to pull the class out of a slump if I can just chill out enough to hear myself think.

That' great to hear, Lily. I also have found that especially with teens and younger people, sometimes actually acknowledging that things aren't working and having a conversation about it can yield a much better dynamic.

I think so much of being a teacher is working out your boundaries and that can take months, even years. The corollary of that is certain lessons (indeed, whole classes over whole terms/school years - I have the scars!) that can collapse around you - particularly in the early years. I don't know that there's a shortcut for it. It's that old saw that you 'can't learn experience'. It sounds like you've handled it well. A reset, a re-drawing of your expectations and a new topic can work (small) wonders, I think.

I also think you just grow a thicker skin with this stuff; as time passes, you're less likely to catastrophise and will just shrug those lessons off because in the grand scheme of things...

This won't really help you--you seem to have righted the ship anyway--but something I wrote on the board two or three times after particularly awful days. It's a quote from Earl Weaver: "We do this every day." And I'd talk about it--no matter what happened yesterday, you get to come back the next day and try it again. The thing that makes teaching so hard is also the thing that sooner or later fixes the problem.

Right— when I was adjuncting, I had a class that collapsed around me in spring 2018, but luckily I was also teaching another course at the time that was one of the better courses I'd ever taught, up to that point. The collapsed class still made me feel horrid, but much of the fault there can be laid upon working with a crap syllabus that someone else wrote (not my choice!) and two students in a class of 20 who made sure to be disruptive every chance they got. I failed more students that semester than I ever had previously, and blamed it on myself for awhile, but no more.

^This.

xp That's great clemenza. I'm going to steal the quote and your reading of it for the teaching book I'll never write.

My day. I have a new tutor group. 31 11yr olds every morning. They were berating today for not wearing a tie because it made me look 'informal'. Fine. One kid looks at me thoughtfully and says 'you look like a dad who's given up'. Oof. Skewered. Utterly.

Christ, look at that post. Can you tell I've been teaching minor sentences?

I think it also sends a message to the students, who, starting in the junior grades, will get it: no matter what you throw at me, I will be back here tomorrow. (Weaver was talking about the difference between baseball and football: "This ain't a football game, we do this every day.")

important article about professional burnout, passion for one's work and my favorite scale for measuring burnout, the MBI. recommended reading!!!!

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/09/10692458/burnout-work-millennials-ambition-scam

I am not a teacher but we got a message from kid's high schools saying "we know there's a Tik Tok "slap your teacher" challenge, please be advised that if you slap a teacher you're getting expelled" -- jesus, teachers, is this a real thing, are kids slapping you for Tik Tok clout, or is this a bizarre moral panic about something that doesn't exist?

i heard someone else mention it too -- i think it is a thing (i do not teach k-12 so i did not get slapped)

Thanks for that, LL. Needed it today, which is my last day freelancing for a company I've been working for on and off since the year began. At first I was really worried about not having a job, and then I realized: oh shit, I get to have my birthday (on Monday) to do what I want, for the first time in YEARS. I'm going to do things I want to do! It's going to be great.

In other words, I have often preached the sort of lessons that this article is offering, namely that work can be joyous and fun, but that no matter what, it is still *work*, and it cannot be the center of one's existence.

make it the center of your existence at your peril

this part from the beginning resonated w me having been laid off and subsequently devastated

Being jobless, then, isn't only difficult because of the financial instability — it's also a kind of social death. As such, the fate of the jobless — the attendant derision or pity is often used as a cautionary tale. And the warning works: Most of us are terrified of losing our livelihoods.

who is a teacher who is not teaching? ;_;

The Tik Tok challenge is sort of a thing, but it remains to be seen how much of one. September's challenge was to vandalize school bathrooms and steal from the school, and a bunch of our bathrooms did get vandalized and my key card got stolen. I guess the Tik Tok stars behind this have rolled out another set of challenges and October's is "slap a teacher," but my guess is that kids who are willing to anonymously trash a bathroom are going to be much less inclined to hit their teachers and hopefully the whole thing will fizzle out.

The 50-day supply limit is back in place for retired teachers where I am. It was lifted last year, and I ended up doing ~80+ days, mostly remote. I was hoping they'd lift it again. I'd supply virtually every day if I could.

This perplexes teacher friends of mine: "Why would you want to keep doing this if you retired?" The first answer is simple, and they get this part: I still like being in the classroom, I just couldn't take any more staff meetings, reports, parent interviews, or never-ending curriculum revisions and preposterous new gimmicks (Growth Mindset! Transformation Practices! Etc.!).

The other answer, though--underscored by a class where I've supplied three times this year--is that I can take a day or a couple of days of certain kinds of students, but that's my limit now; the idea of having to go back every single day knowing X and Y will be sitting there wore me out after a while. There are two guys in particular in this one class (a 5/6). The first is the guy who just does and says one silly thing after another; he can't help himself. The other is the guy who has to blurt out every thought that crosses his mind. Sometimes they trade places: during a slide show I was presenting today, the guy who blurts out fell out of his chair not once but twice. Their teacher has asked if I can fill in for the rest of the week: I committed to tomorrow and Thursday, but I'm looking for a excuse to pass on Friday. Two days of such students is pretty much my limit now.

xp

After ten years in grad school limbo (oh the places I go!), I started working as a special ed aide in a high school's autism program a couple of weeks ago. One of the kids got triggered by water last week and ended up socking me in the head and shoulder, but I think it was a psychotic episode rather than the result of a TikTok challenge.

We also had a destroyed toilet, reportedly.

I get a surprise four day weekend this week! We were supposed to have just Thursday off, but so many teachers requested leave for Friday that with our sub shortage there weren't enough subs to cover it all, so they're just closing school for the day. I've worked through every weekend since school started, so this is unheard-of luxury.

This is pretty corny, I know, but it's also pretty great.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2021/12/24/third-grade-teacher-makes-full-court-shot-smerconish-intv-ctn-vpx.cnn

The thing that makes me laugh is that this teacher is going to have zero problems with this class for the rest of the year; she's god and Superwoman and the most famous Tik Tok/Instagram/YouTube superstar all rolled into one. She'll be pretty much walking on water from now till June (and probably beyond).

my partner does admin work for a brooklyn charter school and is telling me that 65% of her parents have moved into full on "let me speak to your manager" mode

I am getting increasingly nervous about going back to work tomorrow - not fear of covid, but just the sense of not knowing what's coming next and whether I'll have full classes or half the class out or a sudden switch to remote teaching or what. I'm figuring I should make two slideshows & lesson sequences for each class - one with the actual lesson, the other with a game of Mafia in case half the class is gone.

Premier of Ontario is speaking right now; looks like he's moving from a two-day delay (a ridiculous half-measure) to two weeks. He's giving everyone less than 48 hours notice--parents need to arrange for daycare, teachers need to revamp whatever plans they had for online. I also got an e-mail this morning saying the 50-day supply limit for retired teachers has again been bumped to 95 days; they're obviously expecting a ton of absences, even with the move online.

We got today off for voluntary rapid testing for everyone. I wonder if this is just so they can catch as many cases as possible and have a ton of absences, or if they will switch to remote/ delay the start if they get a certain number of positive results.

I always forget where you are...

I'm in Seattle. This fall went fine, apart from a sub shortage, but the sub shortage is such that I really don't know how we're going to deal with staff absences during this surge. Who would want to sub right now?

I'd be fine going in if I hadn't had to cancel my booster. In Ontario, they were taking people out of various teachers colleges to supply last winter--I don't think they've yet reached that stage again, but it may follow.

That's a point, I suppose we'll get a few subs who are boosted, but they've already been drafting teachers to sub during their prep time, and even with that they had to close school on the Friday after Veterans' Day because there wasn't enough coverage. So it's hard to be full steam ahead with planning when I don't really know what to plan for.

It looks like the school closure here (Ontario) is on a collision course in the next week or so, before the scheduled return on Jan. 17.

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/group-of-ontario-parents-boycott-remote-learning-in-the-face-of-new-public-health-restrictions-1.5732260

https://www.cp24.com/news/pediatrician-groups-call-for-ontario-schools-to-reopen-no-later-than-jan-17-1.5732019

https://globalnews.ca/video/8497509/ontario-faces-pressure-to-reopen-schools-as-virtual-learning-takes-toll-on-kids-parents

My assumption at first was that we'd be out for a month, maybe longer, but I'm not sure now. Based on my three days of remote supply last week, I can attest to the fact that the schools are a mess. There was no dayplan for any of the three days. The first day was for a teacher who'd been off for a month, without an LTO ever being hired; two of the four Google Meet codes I was given in the morning didn't work and had to be resent, and the period 7 Google Meet was empty. (And no one ever returned my e-mail with an explanation.) The the second day I got the call at 9:10, half an hour into the day; I'm not even sure what that means. I was back with the same class the next day, and it actually went well--great group of kids (grade 2), improbably still really keen. But they were the exception--I spent a month teaching zombie-kids last spring, and I'm sure I'll encounter that again very soon. All in all, my sense is one of all parties--parents, students, teachers--starting to give up.

It's really starting to get to me. I needed to spend all weekend working to try to catch up and plan for the next week, and today I was just crushed by exhaustion and couldn't do anything. It's a bad sign when you know you're going to be behind for the week because you couldn't spend your Saturday working. And there's still that uncertainty of not knowing if we might suddenly go remote, or how many students will be out if we're in person. And knowing that unless I get Covid I can't take a day off because there's no one to cover for me.

this is not a real school year

im not trying to be glib bc this year is so fucked up (and last year too), i think we should all just recognize that this is not real, planning is not real, grading is not real, you just do your best and get some rest and charge the rest to the game. i love doing this too much to let how terrible this all is to deprive me of future joys, so im just not working hard at all out of self preservation.

Thank you and I didn't think you were being glib at all. I think I'm just so new to secondary teaching that I'm losing all sense of what a real school year even is. I had one year of full-time teaching, accompanied by burnout, followed by a year of subbing that turned into the start of the pandemic, followed by a year of remote teaching and now this. I don't really know how to measure this against previous years.

yeah this is all weird and fucked up, i mean "normal" years have their own weirdness and fuckedupness but you learn year to year how to anticipate and contingency plan for that and in the meantime you can still do extracurricular stuff and not have people's sloppy mask-wearing habits (including coworkers for fucks sake) as a constant strain. this is my 12th year of teaching all at the same campus fwiw.

(xpost) I agree with all of that (which is, admittedly, easier for me to say since retiring from full-time). I'd aim to keep the kids engaged as much as possible, get as much curriculum as you can in there without worrying in the least about keeping up, clear time every day for the students to do whatever it is they like best, and remind them every so often that this will end eventually. I felt good Friday in that I'd taught this grade 2 class to use Google Draw and how to format an acrostic poem on a Google Doc; with younger kids, you can try to show them all kinds of apps and programs they've never used. Much harder with older kids, obviously.

m bise otm

any rhetoric your admin may be giving you, Lily, about the need to give even more of yourself is bullshit cover for keeping the economy churning. Normal learning is not possible under these conditions. You’re a teacher, not a martyr. Take care of yourself!

hi horseshoeeeeeee!!!!

<3 hope you and your fam are weathering this nonsense okay, m bise

likewise friend!!

That's a really important message to hear again and again m. bison and I have to keep telling myself that. I'm pretty close to burnout myself. I have only been doing it for five years and have lost sight of 'normal' if indeed I have ever really had it.

Someone unthinkingly offered me a job over Christmas. The job is irrelevant (marketing!) but my readiness to say yes to him (actually, cuddle him, chew his arm off) made me realise just how close to the edge I was. I honestly think I'd jump now, given the chance.

Lily, you're in a shitty organisation there, and not getting the right messages or support. I'd say hang in there and keep looking for ways out. And as m.bison says, although it doesn't feel like it now, the job is worth fighting for.

Thanks everyone. Honestly I think a lot of it is coming from me. There are some weeks where I feel like I know how to do a good job for my students, and then weeks like this one where I feel like I don't have it in me to give them the level of teaching they deserve. I don't feel like I'm getting extraordinary pressure from admin - as a part-time teacher in an elective subject, early in my career, I think I actually get a lot of slack. But I have expectations for myself and I haven't figured out how to deal with the times when I don't meet them.

Anyway, lots of sympathy and solidarity to everyone who's teaching right now. It's good to hear from all of you.

weeks like this one where I feel like I don't have it in me to give them the level of teaching they deserve

The absolute worst feeling, the one time--when I switched grades and our school moved into another building temporarily--where I sought outside help/medication. Either it or just time worked; after a couple months, that feeling went away.