I found another lost post. I wrote it the week (or so) before school started, then must have completely forgotten about it because I wrote a new post that I actually posted on here. Since the beginning-of-the-year stuff doesn’t really matter (and I wrote about it anyway, even though with a different, not-quite-so-morbid tone), I cut that part out. This is the part that I want to share with you know, when all the illusions have come crashing down for the last time:
Now, the flip side of this fresh, new beginning every August is the high expectations for utter perfection. We all know what we need to be – we’ve seen the movies of the superhumanly inspirational teachers who save the world. The Freedom Writers, and the Mr. Hollands with their Opuses, and the Akellahs and their Bees. The Mother Teresas of teaching.
And we’re all expected to be just like that.
The problem is, in your school, there’s going to be someone who excels at one of the many individual facets of teaching, and you – and kids, and parents – will compare yourself to each in turn. And now, August, is when you remember all those things, and vow to live up to those (most of the time unreasonable) expectations.
Your classroom must be perfect – posters perfectly aligned, desks in a productive yet open and friendly configuration, files color-coded to allow for instant access to student’s records and that lesson you taught that one day like three years ago on that thing about plants where the kids made that diorama and you showed them all off at Open House, remember that lesson?
Lesson plans ready the Friday before (by noon, preferably), with differentiated instruction noted for each student with an IEP, higher order thinking skills present in every activity, multiple intelligences and learning styles included and celebrated throughout the lesson, and brilliant anticipatory sets and thought-provoking lesson conclusions.
Constantly and eternally available to students, whenever they may or may not need you.
***
That’s when I stopped writing. But this is one of the reasons I gave up: the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Expectations are set so high for teachers; set by the teacher herself, by the parents, by the administration… and when that teacher realizes that she’s far from the ideal (because the ideal is, truly, superhuman), she crashes. She can’t take it.
Or, rather, I can’t take it.
So I crashed. Again. And this time I’m staying down. TKO’d.
