The first conscientious step in the right direction began when I had a conversation with a different teacher from my department. He was telling me about the demand placed on teachers today by policy. First, with No Child Left Behind, teachers are charged with the difficulty of differentiating instruction to reach students with cognitive and emotional disabilities which a year prior would have been saddled in special education classes. Second, with Race to The Top, the numbers game needs to be played as well. Now, middle of the road and higher level students (holistically, the larger contingent) need to excel in order to ensure funds for your school in the future.
In short, teachers need to reach low-level students while at the same time demanding strong performances from the mid to high level students.
In shorter, teachers need to reach everyone.
This isn't possible. I typically compensate for my natural cynicism by approaching things with hopeful optimism, but this is too absurd to grant the grain of salt any validity.
Before my daunted helplessness took over, my step-mom's father (half-grandfather?) called me and we talked at length about education. He himself being a teacher for longer than my lifespan, and even teaching at just about every level of schooling I myself have been through. Our conversation at one point went thusly:
"Are you doing your best?"
"Yes," I replied. "I just fear that it's not good enough."
"At this point it won't be."
I was rocked by this, but didn't know how to put it to words. After reading an INCREDIBLE book about the importance of one's own story I came across a harsh realization which has since freed me from my bondage to my own sense of perfection:
I am a tree in a story about a forest.
I am just a twenty something in a much larger story than that of a new teacher in a new town. I am a straw of hay in the field of others' dreams. Most of which having nothing to do with my current profession of passion. I am a person who teaches, and not a teacher who sleeps.
Since this realization, I have been freed. I have stopped expecting God to make me feel good in the times I'm not frantically lesson planning (more on that in the next post). I have been calling people from home, and enjoying conversation.
This is what it feels like to accept the lack of control over one's own life. I have had this feeling often, yet it's typically in the moratorium's I take from trying to control my own life. My story isn't about the forest; it's about the one tree. Considering my age, a sapling no less!
Life is bigger than me, and not because life is huge. It's actually quite isolated to the individual scope of the living (more specifically, the individual). So in reality, life isn't as huge as I am small. I am an onlooker to a vast sky of stars with the ability to fry my body if I were to venture within a light year of it's luminescence. I am not the forest; I am a tree. And while names may get carved into me, my ultimate role is to serve as I was meant to serve, and the story will include me not as a protagonist, but as a contribution to the setting.
What could be more freeing than that?
