March is Slice of Life month...

All month?! All month. The challenge is to write a slice about your day, every day, during the month of March and share it on the blog developed by Two Writing Sisters. I have not been successful in the past. I've been incredibly hit and miss. And for several years now I haven't even tried to participate. But the timing is changing and my life seems to be in a space where I am ready to accept and rise to the challenge. 

I've been encompassed by my past life, teaching, of late. I was not invited back to a teaching position last year. And that in and of itself is a whole gamut of emotion. Up and down and angry and twisty and knotted and sad and indignant and blaming and then self-blaming and hopeless and then back to angry. and let's just go around another time. Ugh... 

Last year, I took on a whole lot of new. A new grade, in a new district, including a move to a new community, and more. I moved from 1st grade to 5th grade. And I was lost. Lost, lost, lost. But to compound things, I was teaching the smallest class I had ever had (11 at it's largest), with 2 of those students having parents on the school board and a 3rd student having a parent that was besties with the family of the president of the school board. There was no room for error. I made an exorbitant amount of errors.

I could have developed a love for 5th grade and even a niche for it. It could have been my jam. But not with the amount of time I had and the margin for error that was afforded to me. Zero. That was the margin. 

Not by my administration. My principal/superintendent afforded me a margin. An amazingly wide margin, knowing what I was up against with the parents and students. She was amazing and she did everything she possibly could have done in order to help me. She guided, she encouraged, she empathized, she ran interference, she found me some capable assistance, she counseled. So what was my deal? That is the question I still ask myself almost daily. 

Why, with that amount of kind, accepting support, could I not succeed? Was it pure laziness? Self-loathing? ineptitude? Was I just too overwhelmed? Too tired? Too scattered? Was I simply in over my head? 

Why?

Seriously though.

My inner chatter goes through this on the regular. And I vacillate. One day it's all about the indignant, self-righteousness, and the voices in my head blame those sons-a-bitches who had the audacity to treat me with less than fair and reasonable expectations. One day, or maybe the same day that starts out angry, self-righteous, and indignant, the overwhelming take away is my own failures. And self-ridicule. What is the hell ever made me think that I could teach? And teach 5th grade?! I am a Kinder teacher at heart and an okay first grade teacher. I can stretch those little minds and make them readers and make them love me and do literally anything I ask of them, which makes them try. try. Try. TRY. 

I went into this gig thinking I could make 5th graders try. (insert insane laughter here). I do not have that much power. I cannot influence them in the same way I can Firsties. And I cannot influence them when they are NOT SUPPOSED TO BE INFLUENCED according to parental dictates and judgements. 

On the good days, I still strongly believe I was on a right and good path with some things. Writing. My students had to journal every day. Every morning, whether we met in person or in a Zoom meeting, there was a journal prompt waiting for them in google classroom. Every morning. And a rubric to measure their writing quality that laid out clear expectations. Which is something parents seemed to want. But apparently their children were not to journal because the parents thought it was dumb." I had no way of showing them what all their children were learning when they follow the prompts. So some students did the minimum and got the marks to match. Which furthered the divide. Some of them didn't do the journaling at all. In spite of parent contacts and detention. So you can lead a young writer to the blank page/screen, but you cannot make said writer pound it out on the keyboard. 

Okay, that is only one tiny slice of that slice of my life. It's like if I took this piece of my teaching life, this one small year and split it into a million other pieces and then chose one of those pieces and slivered it down even farther. I know. So that means that this is not a clear and complete view of this part of my life. Maybe not even a complete slice. But it has drained me and saddened me and overwhelmed me in just this short glimpse. So that's all folks. Tomorrow being a new day, I may or may not give you another slice of this same cake. Only tomorrow will tell. 

If you want to read everyone else's slice, visit here: https://twowritingteachers.org/2022/03/02/day-2-sol22/