T-minus 5….

 The final countdown. That is, one week, 4.5 days, until winter break, a full 2 weeks off from work. 

Yes, I’m looking forward to it.

Though I am also already projecting myself to the last day or two of it, where I’m wishing it was going on for longer and worrying about all the stuff I wanted to get done but didn’t do.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about my journey as a new teacher. Things are slowly improving, emphasis on slowly. I still feel far away from anything resembling mastery. But I do notice I’m getting better at the things I’m doing. Discipline, making sure the kids are working, teaching lessons. In a nutshell, I’d say, “still far away, but improving.”

I was reflecting via a Tom Brown course I was taking this weekend (It’s been a long time since I’ve done any of them and I felt the need to do at least one before the year ended.) on what it is that makes me not look forward to going to work. And the answer I got was that I’m afraid of failing. It’s perhaps the main reason I sometimes fantasize about creating an effective teacher training program. I feel utterly unprepared for my job. It feels like taking a class in college that has no teaching, just tests on lessons you’ve never learned. Like some kind of advanced calculus class, where you don’t know what half the symbols mean. Every day, is test after test, where you’re being judged and are acutely aware that you are failing. 

Unfortunately, this class has no text books, no Wikipedia article. Or more accurately, it has lots of books and articles, but none of them actually show you how to solve the problems. There are various tips about how to solve the problems, but how to actually apply that to the daily testing is unclear, and when you try to, it seldom works at all, and if it does, it is only moderate, and often temporary.

Math is not a good analogy, because we are dealing with human psychology here. It is an ever changing field. There are theory’s but little consensus, and the application of the theory’s is hard to figure out. And in addition to all that, the hours are long and the work is taxing. There is little time and less energy at the end of the day, to try and reflect on how things have gone and how to make them better.

But ultimately, the painful part of that is the feeling that I am a failure, that I am doing a bad job and that is not ok. Or if not truly bad, then deeply mediocre. Nobody wants a life where they spend most of their day being deeply mediocre. It is not a recipe for going to bed satisfied with the day’s work.

Obviously, my psychology is making me miserable. If I was simply totally fine with being mediocre, day in day out, then I would be fine. If I was not worried about failing, then I’d be more playful, experiment more, learn more, etc.

Part of the problem, I think, is not having clear, inspiring goals that I can be working towards. My goals are pretty vague. “Be a good teacher,” “help them grow as human beings.” And even those, I rarely stick my head above water to think about. Usually I’m buried in the minute to minute needs of the children and the classroom, and don’t have the mental space or physical time to pause and reflect on such things.

Time to go. Next post will probably be during my break. Woo!