Crisis of Faith

I'm 9 weeks into my 9th year of teaching. Ever since I walked into my first classroom, I've never questioned that I found my calling. Some people go to work every day at the same place for 20 years, retire, and never look back; others move around from job to job, unwilling or unable to settle in one place for long. I've never had that problem. I love my job. In some ways, I AM my job.

Still, when I opened an email this morning from a coworker that warns of a script that the new district administration plans to implement, for the first time I seriously considered leaving the profession. This year has been a difficult one. Our district has an all-new top administrative team and they are very different from what we have had in the past. Teachers across the state are, of course, growing increasingly frustrated with the changes, requirements, testing, evaluations, et cetera, ad nauseum. I recently asked my mother, who is more than 35 years into her career as an educator, if it's really "that bad," or if it's just my current perspective. I've heard other veteran teachers say they don't stress every new initiative, because they've seen so many come and go, and my mom echoed those sentiments. I don't have the benefit of decades in the school system, but I do have 8 complete years as perspective, and I can definitely say that this year is different. Maybe it's the new administration (district and school). Maybe it's Common Core. Maybe it's the fact that we allot more than 140 out of our 180 student contact days for some sort of testing. Maybe it's the possibility that I will be expected to teach my lessons from a SCRIPT. Whatever it is, it's too much.

I am ONE person. I am responsible for 120 children of varying interests, backgrounds, socioeconomic situations, native languages, levels, skills, and abilities. I am expected to write rigorous and engaging lesson plans which are implemented bell-to-bell, and assign meaningful tasks that assess higher-order thinking skills and accurately reflect the learning that happens in my classroom. I am expected to have at least 2-3 assignments in the grade book each week, in a timely manner, and contact parents of students who are not performing adequately, or who are behavioral problems, or who have too many absences. I am expected to know, off the top of my head, which students get which accommodations, which students have language difficulties, which students are levels 1, 2, and 3 for FCAT, which are "on the bubble"--either close to achieving the next level or at risk of backsliding to the previous level, which students are homeless, hungry, sick, upset, angry, or depressed. I am expected to attend parent conferences and faculty meetings and trainings and Professional Learning Community gatherings either during planning or after school. I am expected to administer and proctor tests. I am accountable for how my students perform on those tests, regardless of whether they ate breakfast this morning, or broke up with a boyfriend/girlfriend, or their parents are divorcing, or their fathers deployed for Afghanistan yesterday, or they just stayed up too late last night and now they're going to sleep instead of taking the test. I have to write down my teaching certificate number on my training acknowledgement form, because if something goes wrong during the test, I might lose my teaching credentials.

I am ONE person, and there is no way on this earth that I can do all of this between the hours of 6:45 a.m. and 2:35 p.m.

That means that I am working FAR beyond the hours for which I am paid. Currently, I have three boxes of projects and assignments waiting to be graded. Some of them are summer reading projects, some are homework, some are class work. Some are vocabulary worksheets (quick and easy to grade, but a pedagogical "no-no") and some are essays (which, even graded holistically, take 2-3 minutes each). I rarely leave work before 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and I only leave then because I have to pick up my own children from their daycare. Sometimes I drop them off with a family member and keep on working. My daughter asks me sometimes when I'm putting her to bed whether Mommy has to "go do work" before I can go to sleep, because she's heard me say that so often.

Yes, I'm ranting. And yes, to anyone who hasn't spent time in a classroom, I sound self-pitying. But teachers...they will get what I'm saying. I don't have the time to spin out the analogies between teachers and doctors/lawyers/dentists/whatever, and I think we've all heard them enough by now. I don't have time to argue, or rage, or rant, or vent...none of those things are working. Nothing is changing, at least, not for the better. Instead, I feel as if I am approaching a crisis--do I stay, or do I go? I'm afraid to tackle that question head-on, or even to think about it for too long. I'm terrified of the answer.

Playing By the Rules

I failed my driving test the first time. Up until that point, I'd done everything right: took the DATE course, got my learner's permit on my 15th birthday so I'd have a whole year to practice driving, even took private driving lessons right before I turned 16. I was ready; I'd done my homework and went confidently in the direction of my dreams...I mean, driver's license. Everything was great...right up to the part where I had to park between four cones. When I pulled in to the parking space, I could see that I was going to hit a cone. There was nothing I could do about it, so I went for it. And I failed the test.

On the way back to the DMV office, the test administrator casually informed me, "You know, you could have just backed up and straightened out to park." Um, no, I didn't know. No one had told me that! I was stunned by the unfairness of it all. If I'd only known that one little rule, I would have easily passed the test. (For what it's worth, I went back a few days later and passed easily, and I've been terrorizing the roads ever since.)

What happened to me that day? I didn't know the rules. Despite everything I'd done to prepare, my ignorance cost me my license (for a few days, at least). In the grand scheme, it wasn't a huge loss, but to 16-year-old me, it was nearly the end of the world.

Imagine if the stakes had been higher. What, if, for instance, because I made one mistake, I hadn't been allowed to take the test again for 6 months or more? What if I wasn't given any help when and where I needed it? What if all my peers passed their tests and were able to motor off without me? What if the tested material or rules changed again and no one told me that, either?

These questions might sound a little melodramatic when posed by a teenager taking a driving test, but they are a very real analogy for the testing situations our students face on an almost daily basis. In the 2011-2012 school year, over 140 of our 180 student contact days were devoted to some sort of testing or other--tests which would be determining factors in course placement, promotion or retention, remediation or advanced studies, and even some students' ability to graduate.

I'm entering my ninth year of teaching. Since 2005, I have taught Intensive Reading to low-performing 9th, 11th, and 12th graders, English I, English II and English II Honors, English III, AP Language, and AP Literature. I've been a color guard instructor and taught Leadership. I've been involved at every grade level in a student's high school career, seen every assessment, taught every ability level.

I begin in 2005 with no specific curriculum, following the textbook in more or less chronological order; the only classroom "strategies" I had were loosely based on Kagan strategies (though I didn't know at the time that's what they were called). Then came Learning Focused, with its curriculum maps, Unit and Lesson Essential Questions, "vocabilary" Word Walls, Activating Strategies, and Shoulder Partners, all packaged and endorsed by Max Thompson. Next, we moved away from the brand name Learning Focused, but still used many of the strategies, especially Collaborative Pairing, with a special focus on HOT (Higher Order Thinking) questions. A few years ago, we began to attend PLCs, where we are expected to align our strategies both Vertically and Horizontally; train to administer the FCAT, EOC, AP, Discovery, MAZE, PERT, and PSAT exams; disaggregate the data received from those exams (especially to identify the Bottom Quartile); and Unpack Common Core Standards. Three years ago, we adopted a whole new Language Arts textbook series and changed our curriculum maps to reflect the change. Last year, we implemented the dreaded SpringBoard curriculum district wide, which required the purchase of all new books for every student in middle and high school, plus extensive training on what promised to Fix all of our Problems. We were assured that this time, we would see it through for a few years, at least long enough to see if it actually worked.

Seem like a lot of buzz words, acronyms, and strategies in just 8 years? It gets better.

When this year rolled around, we returned to school rested and ready to go, only to discover that not only are we NOT using SpringBoard again, but we are getting entirely NEW curriculum maps and lesson planning guidelines (which, of course, are not complete and are not available for use during pre-planning week). All of the hours spent in training and planning an entirely new and completely foreign curriculum, all of the dollars spent on training and materials, all of the times we teachers had to reassure students that this, unlike all of the other Next Best Things they've seen over the years, is here to stay...wasted. Gone. Back to square one.

What do you think this is doing to our children? If teachers are so turned around that we don't know if we're coming or going, what do we expect from our students? Teachers are more than just experts in our fields; unlike other professionals who are required to have a certain amount of knowledge related to their jobs, we must also know how to convey that information to others in such a way that they comprehend and retain it. We have to know what all that jargon, all those acronyms, mean, and we have to be able to apply that knowledge. But how can we do that, when we are constantly being ushered onto a new playing field? It's hard to play the hand you're dealt when you get new cards before you've even had a chance to look at the old ones. Children crave consistency; whether they are four or fourteen (or forty), children (and adults!) thrive on routine and stability. Every parent who's raised a child through toddlerhood knows this, so why, WHY are we constantly changing the rules? How can we expect to truly and meaningfully measure our students' growth and success when the scale changes from year to year? How can we measure students, teachers, and entire schools on scale that's adjusted according the whims of politicians who've never set foot into a public school classroom?

One of the things I hear consistently in professional development is to "plan with the end in mind." When planning instruction, first determine your objective. Do you want students to write an analysis essay based on a passage you've assigned? Begin your lesson plan with that goal, and determine what skills your students will need to be successful in achieving that goal. Sounds simple, right? In theory it is...except, how do you plan to hit a moving target? How do you create a plan for success when you don't know the goal from one year to the next, or from the beginning of the year to the end?

Let's give our kids a chance. Leave them, and us, the teachers, alone, and let us do our jobs. Give them, and us, the time and resources to prove that we can play by the rules...I promise we won't let you down.

Lock Up Your Daughters....

No, really. There's people like this out there, sitting right next to her in math class, and you don't even know it. Scary, isn't it?

What's even scarier is the possibility that HE doesn't even know it.

Of the seemingly countless lessons that should be learned from the Steubenville rape case, perhaps one of the most important is that our sons and daughters need to know what rape is, and that it's wrong. They need to know, boys and girls alike, that no matter how a girl is dressed, or how drunk or high she is, or how much she flirts, that she is not "asking for it," and it is NOT ok to have sex with her without her express consent. The inability to say "no" is not implied consent. The inability to speak coherently, or to speak at all, is not implied consent. In fact, there IS NO "implied" consent. There is only consent. Black and white. Yes or no.

I think (hope) that we can all agree that what those two boys did is wrong. What's even more disturbing, however, is the number of other teenagers who were involved: planning to get the victim to the party and get her drunk, watching, laughing, and even taking pictures and distributing them on the internet. At seemingly no point did anyone think this is wrong and try to put a stop to it. Instead, they egged the boys on, took pictures, and sent texts to their friends about what was going on at the party. Even after Sunday's guilty verdict, Trent Mays' apology refused to take responsibility for the rape, instead only owning up to taking the pictures and sending them out. It seems clear that the boys, as well as the other partygoers, didn't consider what they were doing rape.

While frightening, it's unfortunately not surprising. CNN's coverage of the verdict sounds more like a lament for the poor, misunderstood teenage boys than it does a celebration of justice for a 16-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted. The clip starts out innocently enough, with CNN anchor Candy Crowley commenting on the emotional climate in the courtroom as the verdict was read, and reporter Poppy Harlow agreeing that it was "incredibly emotional" and "incredibly difficult, even for an outsider" to watch as the verdict was read. Lest you find yourself nodding in sympathy for the victim and her family, however, Harlow quickly clues you in to the REAL victims in this case: the two "promising" young men who "litrally" watched their "lives fall apart." It just gets worse from there.

Lady, I got news for you: when you're convicted of sexually assaulting an underage girl, your life SHOULD fall apart. Yes, it's sad that they made the choices they made, and I'm sure their families are extremely emotional, but I cannot imagine that their pain holds a candle to that of a girl that was raped, naked pictures and videos of her distributed among her peers and all over the internet. As the mother of a young girl, I can also not imagine what her parents must feel. Harlow isn't the only one who misplaces blame, either; a good friend of mine discussed the case and its media coverage with some of her law students, and the majority of them indicated that they considered the attack the girl's fault. Their responses varied from "she was drunk" to "she was asking for it" and everywhere in between, but an alarming number of these teenagers, girls included, placed at least part of the blame on the victim. Even the well-known satirical news outlet The Onion noted, , more than two years ago, that our culture tends to marginalize the victim in favor of the handsome, popular athlete. If this young woman had been assaulted by a stranger on the street, no one would say it was ok. If she had been male, and sexually assaulted by her classmates, no one would say it was ok. But somehow, because she made poor decisions in the company of people she knew and trusted, we are able to rationalize the boys' actions.

I'm not naive. I'm around teenagers all day. Hell, I was one myself not all THAT long ago. I'm not clueless enough to think that my daughter will never make poor decisions, or lie to me, or even find herself in a similar situation to the victim of these two young men. I find that I'm terrified of that possibility, not because I don't trust future Charlotte's future decisions, but because I don't trust the culture and society that will shelter her as she makes her future decisions and, yes, future mistakes. I don't trust the way our society treats its women, and I am enraged that those who point out the discrimination are so frequently branded "feminists" or "radicals." Why is it so radical to ask that every person is treated with respect, regardless of what body parts he or she was born with?

I'm also terrified, perhaps even more so, to be the mother of a boy in that same society. It is MY responsibility to teach him how to view and behave toward women. It might seem like overkill to worry about that now, when he's two months old, but I can't help feeling like every lesson I teach him now will shape him into the brother, friend, boyfriend, and husband that he will become. I'm sure that neither of the mothers of the two Steubenville football players ever looked at her son in his cradle and wished for him to one day become a rapist. They probably didn't sit next to them in the courtroom and think of their sons, 16 and 17 years old, as rapists. But somewhere along the way, that's exactly what those boys became. And while I believe that the boys must take responsibility for their actions, I also wonder if parents should bear at least some responsibility for the men and women their children become. It is up to us, after all, to teach our children right and wrong, and to take responsibility for their actions and own up to their mistakes. I know that I am the person I am today largely because of the lessons my parents taught me, and the experiences and opportunities that I had because of them. And I know that I feel that burden every time I look at my son and daughter. I can only hope that I carry it well, that I can guide my children to become valuable, conscientious members of society...and that society respects and values them in return.

G is for...

Last night, a friend of mine posted this article on Facebook. I don’t normally read everything people post, but the title “What No One Has the Right to Say to Other Moms” intrigued me, so I clicked on the link. I found myself in tears by the time I got to the end.

I just gave birth to my second child two short months ago, and the thing I’ve learned above all is that adding a second child to your family adds more than twice the work, more than twice the sleep deprivation, more than twice the frustration, more than twice the GUILT. And, yes, more than twice the love. Why, then, is it often so difficult for mothers to get past all of the frustration and guilt and allow ourselves the opportunity to genuinely enjoy the moments of love and joy that our children bring to our lives?

Part of the answer, at least, can be found in the same article, where the author provides a link to this gem. (In a slightly ironic, meta-Mommy moment, I was reading these articles on my iPhone, locked in my bathroom while my 4-year-old pounded on the door and demanded to know what I was doing in there.)

I get it. I really do. Childhood goes by in the blink of an eye. I’m pretty sure that my 4-year old was a newborn, like, last week. She twirls in her princess dresses and begs me to play dolls with her and swing her at the park. Sometimes I do…and sometimes I don’t.

Sure, on the surface it may seem obviously selfish to ignore your children while glued to your iPhone. We’ve all had mommy moments where we look at other parents and smirk inwardly that we are so much better at it than they are. In reality, however, the iPhone is just a metaphor, a symbol that could really be replaced by a book, magazine, TV show, computer, sibling, partner, or any other person. It’s an object, representative of Mommy’s Attention. The message here is that Mommy must devote all of her attention, 100% of the time, to watching her children’s every move, and, more importantly, that if she doesn’t, she’s a BAD MOMMY.

As if we don’t have enough guilt. As if we could ever live up to our own standards of mommy greatness. As if we need some other self-righteous person judging us by a 30-second snapshot of our actions. As if.

My own guilt could eat me alive. Earlier this week, I was talking to my husband about when our son might be weaned from nursing. I’m going on a week-long business trip in June, so I mentioned that if he wasn’t weaned by then, it would probably happen while I was gone. Immediately, I began to question whether I should go; it was not the first time I had done so. The trip is to Louisville, KY, to read AP exams, which I have wanted to do for several years and which should provide an immense opportunity for professional development and networking. It’s an opportunity that’s by invitation only, and I’m super stoked…except for the enormous guilt that I feel every time I think about leaving my family for a week. It’s not just being away from the baby, though that’s a large part of it. I also feel guilty for leaving my husband to take care of our two children alone for a week (though, let’s be honest, men travel for work all the time, without a second thought). I feel guilty for leaving my 4-year-old daughter, who is already convinced every time she loses sight of me that I’m never coming back. And I feel guilty because I’m excited at the prospect to be going on this trip, even though it means being away from my family for a week. Do you see a theme here? I’m torn; I want to be a good mother, a good wife, a good teacher. So why does it feel like I can only be good at one of those things at a time? Why do I have to pick?

I think this is a problem that is somewhat unique to women in our society. I’m not by any means saying that fatherhood is easy, or that fathers lack dedication or don’t make sacrifices for their children and families, but I really don’t think they have the same experiences that mothers have. I remember a few years ago when my husband stayed home with our sick daughter while I went to work, one of his (female) colleagues questioned “why his wife couldn’t do it.” Even other women are programmed to view childcare as a woman’s job, and raise questions when the mother isn’t there to fulfill that role.

I find that unspeakably sad. Why do we, as women and mothers, feel the need to judge other moms? What her kids are wearing, eating, saying, doing. Whether she breastfeeds (a great discussion of the great breastfeeding debate can be found here). What school her kids attend and activities they do. Whether she’s lost the baby weight or still carries a few of her pregnancy battle scars. Whether she’s washed her hair this week, or has spit-up on her clothes. I know; I do it all the time. I’m constantly measuring myself and my child against other mommies and their children. How much better would it be, though, if we supported rather than judged? Who better to empathize with a new (or not so new) mother’s experiences than one who is going or has gone through the same thing? Our friends and partners may provide a shoulder to cry on or nod in agreement with whatever we say (yes, dear…), but no one understands motherhood like another mother. I know that sounds smug and sanctimonious, but it’s the truth. Yet we, who are hardest on ourselves, are often also hardest on each other.

I feel that it’s so important to give yourself, and others, permission to be human, and that means giving yourself, and others, permission to fail. I feel that it’s important that, even though you’re a mommy, you’re a person as well. It is NOT the end of my daughter’s world if she has to play dolls by herself so Mommy can make a phone call or read a book. I believe that my children will be healthier for understanding that their parents are individuals with lives and interests that sometimes don’t revolve around Doc McStuffins and tea parties. I believe it’s important to know that I don’t stop being me just because I am also Mommy, and that they will learn to be stronger and more independent if they don’t rely on me for attention and gratification every second of their lives. I believe that it’s a skill that will serve them well in the future, when they are students, teammates, friends, and someone’s husband and wife. I believe that most mommies recognize, in some teeny, tiny part of our brains, that motherhood will use us up if we let it. Some mommies are ok with that; others are not. Some parents feel that everything else in life comes second to raising their children; others recognize that if we aren’t good to ourselves, we won’t be any good to our families. Neither choice is necessarily wrong, unless it’s being made because the mother feels pressured to do so.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m tired of the constant judgment that seems inherent with parenthood. Our lives as mothers would be so much easier with the support of our fellow moms, and in turn our children’s lives would be better. Everyone wins. So, I refuse to be judged. And you, judgmental mommy at the park—try paying less attention to what I’m doing wrong. You may be missing out on some of your own magical moments while you’re watching me on my iPhone. I appreciate your concern, but don’t worry…my kids will be fine, and just as importantly, so will I.