Surprise! Honey, I'm Home

This morning, as I sat in a fairly well-run PD workshop on how to teach SIOP students, I compulsively checked my email. I miss my students and wanted news. I received the email from the principal about a number of fights on campus this morning and how there'd be extra security around, an email from an art teacher I'm co-planning with for the Butterfly exhibit on the Holocaust, an awesome youtube video of Michele Obama exhorting students to value their education (literacy block post-thanksgiving!), and the regular email from the basketball coach who runs in-school suspension listing the students that have been sent there (this email gets sent out every block so every teacher knows exactly who's been taken out by security). 

This morning, I saw FIVE of my second block in the email. One of them had been listed twice. So I immediately rattled off an email to the sub to find out what was up. By our lunch break I hadn't heard back, so I hightailed it out of the workshop, broke a whole lot of speeding laws, and raced into my classroom where third block was studying. As I made it in, I saw a gaggle of students literally crawling on all fours into the door, FORTY-FIVE MINUTES after the bell had rang. I strode in the other door.

I felt like a parent who had surprised the kids by coming home early. As they looked up from their projects with glowing smiles or fear (my raised eyebrows collared the ones who had slunk in late-- I took down their names without so much as blinking), I melted into joy. I spoke to the sub and watched as the kids worked. They were mostly on task, but two groups were sitting forlorn. Second block had destroyed their projects. I gave them new supplies, extra credit, extra time, and commiseration. Then I turned back to the sub. 

He told me that two students in my second block had wreaked terror yesterday, as well as another kid hiding out from some other class who really got the class riled up. Today they'd all kept throwing stuff, so he had just had security in to take the ones he saw out. I'm not sure what I'll do tomorrow-- their projects were supposed to be a test grade, and if they don't have them they'll all flunk. I think I'll make an open-book test where they literally simply have to read and find the information. That way they can learn it and get a grade, without hassle. Or fun. But they've pretty much forfeited fun.

The truth is, and I admitted it to my MTLD, I don't believe in this class the way I do my other two. The sub told me my third block were angels, and my fourth block rambunctious fun, but my second block? Terrors that the most hardened veterans would run from. Horribly, I agree. Most of those kids would probably do well enough if they were split up from each other, but mashed together, they're bent on not learning a thing, and making the class as unproductive as possible.

I'm not completely TFA-brainwashed. A part of me believes that if I'm the same teacher with all three classes, there comes a point where it's not me. It's them. Admin will always say that a teacher controls everything in their class, but at the end of the day it requires supernatural powers to work 35 other human beings into a position where they want to learn. If my third block are eager, curious, hardworking scholars, and my fourth block took work to maneuver into fun-loving, competitive, audacious students, then does the fact that my second block refuses to do anything other than verbally and physically abuse each other (and me. And anyone who walks into the classroom.) mean that I'm a failure as a teacher? The fact that I don't think so may make me a terrible teachforamerican, but it definitely makes me a saner human being. 

And now, for the George Eliot (because you know only George Eliot is getting me through 2nd block):

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure. Middlemarch

So. To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield. 

P.S. Walking into that classroom and seeing my third block's faces light up pushed my soul up through my ribcage and into a glow of rainbow above my head. When D, a student who started the semester refusing to work, talk, or say anything other than nasty disrespect to me and the other students, looked up from her half-completed project and asked, "but Ms. W, if this is your lunch break, when are you going to eat?" I could have cried. J kept calling "Ms. W's back!" from across the room (we're working on quieting the propensity to announce everything that happens and commenting on it in the middle of class, but frankly, today it made me happy), and A could not stop rising from his seat to goofily grin at me, hands in pockets, while I spoke to the sub. I had to restrain myself from grabbing them all in a big group hug-- I'm pretty sure that's not allowed. But geez, how you do lose your heart to your students!