Metamorphosis Paper?

Right, so... apparently this paper was cancelled for my EDJH 385 course, but I had already written it, and I am okay with that because I think it was really important for me to write this right now. So, here it is, my first blog post in months. Read if you like!

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This semester has been... a struggle. I thought that commuting from home to Muncie twice a week would not be that big of a deal, but I did not realize all of the issues it would bring along with it. I thought that I could handle working a job this semester, but I did not realize how much working at a job you don’t love can take out of you if you go in every day already exhausted. I have battled with illness, with injuries, with financial and family issues, but the biggest fight I had was with this overwhelming sense of apathy that had pervaded my life since sometime in the spring semester.

That is not to say I stopped caring about becoming a teacher or finishing school, or that I wanted to just give up. I was living my life every day with no motivation or drive, and none of the things that usually excited me did anymore. I simply couldn’t be bothered to do anything except sit in my living room and watch Netflix, and yet that only made the problem worse for me. It was a vicious cycle.  Though the problem began in the spring, I am talking about it now because this semester it had gotten worse. By deciding to move home for the semester and commute, I essentially isolated myself from the beautiful support system our major has created to depend on one another. I would drive the hour and a half to Muncie, go to class, drive home, and work until eleven o’clock at night twice a week. I spent the rest of my week trying to do work for the three online classes I attempted to take, sleeping, or otherwise hiding away in my room from the world. Just about the only thing that seemed to make me smile was the dog I adopted at the end of the summer.

But how does all of that relate to me as a pre-service teacher? Well, perhaps my most significant discovery is realizing that it shouldn’t, that I cannot let my teaching be affected by my personal life. It has also taught me the importance of paying more attention to myself, though, so that I listen when my body or brain are telling me something isn’t right because just a few weeks ago, I finally went to my doctor and told her how I was feeling, and she told me that it could very well be from a medicine I had started taking back in the spring. Here I spent all of this time thinking that it was just a really awful, depressing time in my life and that I could not deal with anything because I was just not trying hard enough when all along it was a side-effect of a medicine. I feel like, until this point, I had accepted the amount of self-sacrifice being a teacher was going to take: always being exhausted, having no life outside of school, not being able to make other things such as family and relationships a priority, and that all may very well still happen, but this semester has taught me that I do not do my students any favors by sacrificing my physical and emotional well-being because I need to tough it out or push through it for them. They need the best me that I have to offer.

My field experience this semester has also had a profound impact on me. For the first time, I had to come face to face with the reality of just how many high school students just do not care. I watched day after day as my cooperating teacher struggled and tried everything to get these kids to want to be a part of class, to work hard, to do well. Some days, we had successes, and then the next day they’d come back with the same terrible attitude as before. It is heartbreaking to see a teacher at the end of the day looking so... dispirited, especially someone as vivacious as Kathleen who has so much passion for her subject and her art and her students. I mean, I cannot tell you how many students she would randomly see in the hallways who she’s had in class and still knows their names. However, asking a teacher to deal with this conditions and expecting them to succeed with these kids is just beyond me.

At some point as a teacher, the students have to meet us part of the way, but what do we do if they are entirely unwilling to budge? This, I feel, is the part of teaching that the politicians who make laws about education honestly just cannot understand. They probably only think of classrooms like the ones I grew up in: well-mannered children whose worst behavior problem is falling asleep in class because they are exhausted from too many extracurricular activities and having to stay up late to finish homework. What are teachers supposed to do in a class where students are required to get up on stage to perform and yet simply refuse to do so? Today, I watched a girl get up to perform her scene with her partner... who knew about two of his lines. She did well for a while, and then she simply lost her focus and gave up costing her a really serious grade cut. Would it have been different if she’d had a partner who cared more and had done his work? It feels so cynical to think this way, but at what point do you allow yourself to accept that it is just too late for some of those kids and let them fail?

Every idealistic bone in my body screams at that concept, just as it did two years ago when Michael Daehn showed us the video about the Hobbart Shakespeareans and Rafe Esquith told someone while he was signing their book that he believed that some students deserved to be left behind, and he was working with kids much younger than high school age! In a system where the responsibility for education has been placed entirely on the shoulders of teachers, where do we get to draw the line and expect students to take personal responsibility for their education? At what age, at what point in a semester is it acceptable to say they know better and that it is their job to do what has to be done to be successful and just stop helping them until they start to help themselves? And then whose fault is it if they DO fail? If they never decide to take initiative, are teachers the ones who should take the blame for giving up on them? Even if it is okay to do that, to stop pushing a student until they meet you part of the way, how am I supposed to make myself okay with that because the thought of developing that mentality is emotionally crushing?