The Great Wall

I think the building of the Great Wall must be like the beginning days of school. A process that seems both exhilirating and frustrating to begin year after year. It requires a lot of discipline (or slave labor) to manage either task.

Actually, we have no idea what manual labor of that caliber is like.

School began and a new batch of faces arrived. I think that I may have left my chutzpah on the Great Wall. Try as I might, I can't get my head in the game this year. I am usually racing with ideas as soon as I check into the program, but for whatever reason, NADA. I am distracted. Riding bicycles and hanging at the beach all day usurped end of summer planning. Wah. Malbecs and pinots filled my mind over positive discipline and community building. I am frustrated...

(Okay, break, someone please tell me why Samuel L. Jackson is doing "Snakes on a Plane" ?!?!)

...back to frustrated. When it seems like something is working and your collegues and you work really hard to make it viable and solid, then you are told that you're going to do it another way, it feels frustrating. I want to believe that these decisions place kids at the heart of the matter, but they sometimes seems awfully kid "unfriendly." There are lots of different philosophies surrounding education and I think that is part of the problem, everyone thinks they have the solution and nobody listens to anyone else and really nobody has the solution. Or rather, they all have good solutions, but think its a zero-sum game. My way or the highway. What works in LA isn't necessarily applicable to NY, Boston to San Francisco, Seattle to Chicago. There are best practices. That's what you learn in teacher school. Then there are classroom experiences. Then there are socio-economics, second-language, etc., etc. I just don't think you can prescribe one thing for all. You are probably thinking that I am a Montessori teacher who thinks all things standards and state testing should be thrown with a brick to the bottom of the ocean. I'm not. I am both a product of and a believer in public education. I won't go there, however.

It becomes like Groundhog's Day. We just see the same shadows again and again and are wondering why winter doesn't come six weeks early. Because it is the nature of the beast. What worked when, doesn't work when and when and now. Or it does. The pendulum swings and probably the best of the best, keep on keepin' on. The 30-year vets that know the business and have managed through a lot of practice to figure out what works. We've thinned it out, dumbed it down because we don't actually believe anyone will want to stay in the game that long and so it has to be that easy to train. I will say one thing, in my district you get a mentor for two years as a beginning teacher (those 30-year vets) and a lot of training, and that is exactly what many beginning teachers need. Okay, I went there. There is no there there, right?

I put too much of myself into it and somehow have to remove some of that. I demand a lot of my students and always will. I go to bat for what I believe to be best for them and it is a lot of emotional energy. The chutzpah, what I believed would eventually with more years would make me a great teacher, is caputz. Someone breathe the life back into me! Augh!

This post is too much a reflection of my end of the day headiness and I think its time to quit and go for a run. Tomorrow after school I have big plans, climbing gym. I have been telling myself for almost a year that I am going to do it and its time to just do. I suppose I will spend the weekend with some immensely sore forearms - which is typically where I feel it.