Haunted By Failure
I have a very particular set of skills. I have been trained to train a large audience in a particular set of skills while keeping them engaged and adjusting the content to their interests. I am very good at what I do and most of my clients succeed… the problem is, my clients are 35 sixth graders and I am a teacher. I am underfunded and I only get paid for the time I’m actively teaching and two thirty minute planning periods.
Like I said, most of my clients succeed. They grasp the basic concepts and they can repeat what they learned when its needed on a test. But, my job isn’t easy. When people think of professions, they think of doctors, nurses, lawyers, vets and they can tell you the hardest things those professions face: losing a patient, having a patient not do what’s best for them, hypochondriacs, losing a case, seeing someone get away with something, seeing someone failed by the justice system, witnessing an owner lose their beloved pet, not having an owner support their pet in their final moments.
The thing is, for the most part, those moments aren’t every day. See, teaching is a profession too and the hardest thing we face is out of our control for many reasons and we face the issue on a daily basis. It’s why teaching faces one of the highest burn out rates of any profession. I’ll give you an example.
I’m an English teacher so of course, I love reading and I love language. One of my passions is to try to share my love with my students. That doesn’t mean I want them all to be book worms like me, but I want them to find love in a book somewhere. I don’t care if the student ends up falling in love with Captain Underpants and that’s all they read. But when you have 35 students with a wide range of interests and backstories, you face failure a lot and it can be really hard to overcome.
I had this student. He is a wonderful personality. He is boisterous and courageous and not afraid to put himself out there. He is so expressive and you can always tell how he’s feeling. A lot of the other teachers struggled with him because if he doesn’t like what he’s learning or he’s struggling, he will let you know.
He didn’t like my class. He said he hated to read but I had learned long ago not to let that sort of thing bother me. What did bother me, was that he loved to discuss and engage in learning but he wouldn’t read and put in the work so that he could participate. It was heart breaking to watch him shut down and give every excuse in the book, desperate to avoid reading but still participate and engage with his classmates.
“This is above my reading level.”
“I have ADHD.”
“It’s too long, I can’t focus.”
“The words are too tough.”
“This story doesn’t make sense.”
The one I heard most often related his struggles back to his ADHD but something told me that wasn’t the real issue. See, I have ADHD too. I’m not saying he couldn’t struggle with reading because I don’t. Mental illnesses can develop differently in different people because… well… we’re all different. But something in my gut told me, there was something more.
So, I refused to give up on him. I greeted him every day and asked him how his day had been. I tried to have conversations to get to know him. His mood seemed to have changed recently. He was always rather moody and closed off. It felt like a struggle just to say hi to this kid.
It was the day that I snapped, the day I though for sure I had ruined all the trust I had built with this kid that I finally learned the truth. He had become especially difficult in class, speaking out, answering questions inappropriately, seeking attention in inappropriate ways. I tried everything before…
“You’re getting a lunch detention. I’ll see you with your lunch in my room later.”
That moment ate me up the rest of the morning. I ruined this kids social hour and I would have to deal with his moodiness during one of my breaks. I knew I had gone back several steps in actually connecting with this kid. But, with the few moments I had before he arrived in my room, I mentally built myself up. I was going to somehow use the time to just try to talk with him.
He entered my room, looking moody and shooting daggers in my direction. I knew I needed to break the ice so… I tried the most cliche thing in the book.
“Look, I know you aren’t a bad kid. I noticed you haven’t really been acting yourself. You don’t want to read and you’ve been acting out a bit in class.”
“I just don’t like reading and I don’t like your class.”
“I’m sorry to hear that… but you didn’t used to talk out of turn and give goofy answers like you have recently. Is everything ok at home?”
There was a moment of silence but I knew not to try to fill it. I took a few bites of my salad and turned my attention to the stack of written responses in front of me. I heard something from his direction but it was really quiet and I couldn’t make out the exact words. He pushed a noodle with his fork.
“Sorry, I didn’t quite hear that. Can you please repeat what you said for me?”
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There was another moment of silence.
“My grandma passed away last weekend.”
“Oh, I am so sorry to hear that. I noticed you weren’t here for a couple of days at the beginning of the week. Were you really close with her?”
The boy looked up at me and honestly, I had prepared myself for tears and I was working through in my head how I was going to give this kid a safe emotional space while still getting ready for my next class. But instead, the biggest smile cracked across her face.
“Yeah. She taught me how to read. I struggled a lot but she read aloud to me and we took turns reading and stuff.” He seemed to perk right up.
“Wow, your grandma sounds like an amazing woman. What did you read together?”
That was one of my few success stories after I was faced with the struggle. I managed to learn what was wrong and I put in extra work to help him out. We ended up meeting every day after school and we would take turns reading the assigned readings aloud together. We would talk about the focus questions ahead of time and he would write down his notes so he could participate in discussions in class.
I’m not trying to say my job is harder than anyone else but teachers face silent struggles and a lot of times we get blamed for our failures. Parents ask why their kid is struggling and often times I don’t have the answer. Politicians want to know why a school’s data is lower than average and I don’t have just one answer.
My kids are more than statistics. They are more than their home lives. There are days I want to give up and it sucks when I have a student that I can’t really help, no matter how much I want to. When a client leaves the doctors office or the court room, or the vet office, you can point to the things you did and just hope the things out of your control work out. I sometimes can’t even point to what I did. Sometimes I just know, I failed a student but I don’t know what more I could have done.
Failure as a teacher haunts you. You run into the student who was such an articulate writer, the few times they turned in an essay, and they are at the local fast food restaurant. They don’t live at home any more and you just hope their story doesn’t haunt you further by having to read their name in the police report of the newspaper. It’s easy to take those cases personally. If you could have just gotten them a higher grade, they could have gotten out of their lousy circumstances… right?
Our successes aren’t as obvious. They get out of their home town. Maybe the hometown paper runs a story about them making the Dean’s list but we don’t get to hear about them unless they write to us years down the road or if they happen to move back to their hometown to raise their kids.
Why am I telling this story?
Because it’s a story that needs to be told. There is a lot wrong with our society and a lot that we could improve but education hasn’t been discussed on the federal level in a whole presidential term and it’s something we need to discuss and improve on a regular basis.
Our system is broken and it has the capacity to do a ton of good. Yes, healthcare is broken, yes, people need to be taken care of. But one aspect of our society everyone is guaranteed to come in contact with, regardless of socioeconomic background, ethnicity, whatever, is education. So why not start there?
Let’s reduce the number of stories teachers face where they felt they failed a student. Let’s increase the number of success stories teachers get to read in the paper or be written to about from a former student. It’s time to talk about education and make it better.
—
Hello friends!
First, I want to say this is a work of fiction though the emotions come from real life and I have faced similar things in real life.
Education is a huge passion of mine so I tend to write about it a lot. I do appreciate support and sharing my story but I would much rather you show support by contacting your local educators. Ask how you can help them! Offer to buy supplies for the classroom. Offer to volunteer and come in during planning to help with copies or simple stuff like that. Offer to come in during class and help collect papers or do small tasks to save them time. See if you have a skill set they could use to design an engaging, fun lesson. There is so much anyone can do to help your local school and you will be amazed what you learn and experience while in the building.
Anyways, let me know if you have a prompt you want to see me tackle and I’ll see you tomorrow!
Today’s prompt: One of your kids has said, “I don’t read. I have ADHD.” You have ADHD, too, though, and you read plenty. You become determined to find out if something else is going on.
