understanding

1. This is the perfect job. I will help underprivileged urban youth. My dedication and hard work will change their lives. I will be the best math teacher they have ever had. The clarity of my lectures and the deeply engaging questions I ask will make them forget that they ever failed before. Things will be different in my classroom. I will pour my heart and soul into this task and I will learn lessons that will help me change the world. My students will succeed and I will love them.

2. This is a rewarding job, but dang it’s hard. All the little interactions and moments are precious. I love figuring out new ways to explain things, but sometimes it seems like it doesn’t matter how well I explain things. I expected this to be difficult at first. I’m surviving. Sometimes I give pep talks that are partly for them and partly for me. I wish there was some discussion at my school about academic difficulty and academic culture. I’m learning alongside my students, and things are tough. I empathize. Next year I will get enough sleep.

3. The lessons I plan work for some students but not others. Students who come to me with prior success in math continue to have success. Very few who have had trouble in the past start succeeding. I need to work harder and get better at making math exciting and interesting but also approachable. And I need to figure out how to remediate the basic skills that so many are missing without watering down the rigor of the class. Scaffolding is really hard, especially with such a huge range of skill levels in the same class. Someone has to have tried to address these issues before, right? How come none of the administrators ever has anything to say about this stuff? And how come the administrators do such low-quality work while I kill myself to do the best I possibly can? Are all urban schools like this?

4. Wow, everyone, everywhere who writes from a firsthand perspective always says the same things. We’re always asking the same questions and struggling with these same issues. I bet students have been choosing not to do their homework, for one reason or another, since homework was invented. I feel powerless against all the forces that conspire to make this the case. We worry about the consequences, and are mystified by the causes. There are deeper social problems in play here. Do I really have the ability to address those issues in an hour a day as a math teacher? Should I even bother asking that question when it feels like no one in charge of anything here cares? Do I have a chance to make a difference, or is all this effort thrown away like the half-done homework papers I hand back?

5. Maybe I should try a different school. Perhaps this one is just messed up from mismanagement, too many incompetent administrators, and neglect. There must be good schools out there that serve this population. There must be a way around the problems that I see everyone complain about. I’ll look for a new job for next year. It has to be possible to get high achievement without whitewashing or brainwashing the kids. I just need to find that visionary, revolutionary leader to work for. We will take the students that I’ve been struggling so hard to reach all this time, and we will shake them out of their complacency and risk-avoidance and give them strength and courage and tools and knowledge and skills and confidence and opportunities. Things will be different.

Honestly, step 5 here sounds even more idealistic than step 1 where I started out 18 months ago. I know I need to be patient. I know I can’t fix everything, and that perfect-or-nothing gets you nothing. But I’m having a lot of trouble seeing how I can make the kind of impact that I want to make by being a pretty good math teacher in the ghetto. Where am I going with all of this? I don’t want to wake up 20 years from now complaining about how I just can’t get the kids to do their homework and how you can lead a horse to water but can’t force him to learn. I want to address the deeper issues here, but I have no confidence that the classroom is the place to do it. Of course, then the cynic asks where else you might expect to get it done. And I have no good answer.