Disappointment. Our school grades came out today, and our grade was a D. Again. It's so very frustrating to work so hard, day in and day out, as a staff and as an individual teacher, and still find little reward for your efforts. Today was my last day of AP training (so I'm officially free for the summer!!!), and our day was interrupted at about 10:30 when the Department of Education finally posted the grades on its website. Most of the other people in my workshop were excited and able to celebrate gains in school achievement--some of their schools went up an entire letter grade. I already knew what our grade was, since my mom had emailed it to me a few minutes earlier...but that didn't make it much easier to see other teachers getting to celebrate their grades. I suppose that we could celebrate the fact that we stayed a D, when everything I'd been told indicated that we'd be an F school this year. I'm thankful that we aren't. Thankful, but still so frustrated. There are teachers who come to school, teach their kids, and go home at the end of the day. I'm not one of them. I don't live and breathe work by any means, but I do carry a lot of it around with me, emotionally and mentally if not physically. I care about my kids, and my coworkers, and my school. I even care about my administration, because I know that they work very hard. And it's not even that I feel unsuccessful, because I know that a lot of my kids did their best every single day, and I know that many of them made huge improvments this year--but through an arbitrary formula, we will once again be viewed as "failing," or the next thing to it.
It is what it is. I'm disappointed, but right now I'm just determined to do my personal best and encourage my students to do their best--it's all I can do.
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