The Stages of Teaching

First-year teachers go through stages (and I know that I am very susceptible to the feelings associated). The first stage is idealism. The new teacher is so full of hope and is going to make things better and touch every single student. The next stage is disillusionment. All the bureaucracy and Political Correctness and paperwork starts to add up, and you begin to feel overwhelmed with the responsibilities and the frustrations that come with it. Then, you realize that some of the students don't want to learn, and some of them are more interested in making your life a living _____.

So, anyway, after that, you either give in to the disillusionment and stop teaching, or you battle through it and enter the realism stage. In the realism stage, you know that you will not reach every student, but you can at least try. Some students will get it, but others will not, and there is nothing you can do to reach some. You can reach a couple you never thought you would. A girl that was in a few of my classes at BYU-Idaho got hired here also. She resigned at the disilluionment stage. The thoughts did cross my mind, but failure is just not an option for me. The good thing is that my vice principal restored some of that hope that gets lost so quickly. I really love this job. I am excited when I get up for work each day (even though I don't get up on time most days).

JPAS

My school district does a thing called Jordan Performance Appraisal System. It is meant to evaluate teachers on their teaching ability and give them a score based on very quantitative data. An administrator comes into a class and observes for 30-40 minutes. Our class times are 45 minutes long. The vice principal came in and observed me for about 35 minutes twice in the last two weeks. The first class she came into was my worst class. They do not behave well, do not like English, and most of them, although smart, do not act like they are very bright. They can understand the work, but for some reason think that it is cooler not to be intelligent. It is pretty frustrating, as you can imagine. The vice principal must have had a good Hawthorne effect aura about her because they were great that day. I taught a good lesson about grammar, and then did something out of our lit book. It was a good class, better than usual.

The second time that she came in, it was in my honors class, and I am glad she came in that day, because it was going to be a discussion day, and not a work day. We had a hard grammar lesson with lots of good questions and answers. We then read an excerpt from Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and then discussed how Maya Angelou is an excellent, descriptive writer who comes from an abusive background and how her background contributes to the depth of the title of that book. Each student had a selection that he or she would read and explain why they thought it was a good example of descriptive writing. It went really well and I think the students even liked it.

Two days ago my vice principal said that she needed to meet with me for five minutes and interrupted herself to compliment me on being an "excellent teacher", which is always nice to hear.

Today, she came into my classroom and talked to me about all that stuff. While we were talking, she confirmed the reasons I have always wanted to be a teacher. She said, to begin with, that I am a natural teacher, I asked excellent questions, and I engaged the students almost the whole time. She gave me a pretty good evaluation, I think. She sends the results in to the district, and then I will have an evaluation with her and the other administrators, I think. We will see how it all goes.