HEATHER
MIGDON
Diary #6
A
Hellish Week for Me — and For My Kids
I never thought I would be the type to fail to see the forest for the trees. I began my endeavor into teaching with lofty ideas like, "I just want my students to love learning." No matter if others felt my goals to be unambiguous or even misguided, I KNEW I was going to teach and love the whole child, and I would only obsess with the details as it became necessary to do so.
At the end of the week before last, I found out that my school would be reorganizing the entire sixth grade based strictly on their test scores from last year's SAT-9 exam. We would begin teaching the new groups on Monday.
Soon I heard the familiar chorus my education classes had trained me to detest "We will have a low group, a high group, and a middle group." My plea that I had just started working with my homeroom only a number of weeks before was met with, "Well, you still might have a few kids from your homeroom in your math or reading class, and you will be keeping your homeroom for social studies." I protested that last year's test scores might have outlived their accuracy, but it seems that the more standardized test scores determine, the less a teacher's input matters.
A hellish week
Monday was a bad day, and Tuesday was no better. As the days in the week got incrementally worse, I prayed for Friday like I never had before. If I could get through this week, I told myself, then I would be home-free. The stress of adapting to a new system was wearing me down.
Never did I consider the stress my students were dealing with. I responded to their misbehavior and "attitude problems" with a variety of ineffective solutions. I yelled, I belittled, I ignored, and I watched the clock. And nothing that I did was escaping my students' notice. The last day of the week was so bad that I stopped Social Studies entirely to focus on the problems we were having as a class that week. Not one student objected by claiming the problem was not his or her fault. They heard what I said: WE were having a problem. Because many of them did not look comfortable or ready to have a class discussion, I had them write down what they wanted this class to look like.What my students said
Their letters told me more than I could have ever guessed on my own. The most common comment from the students who stayed with me for both math and reading was that they wanted people to think that their class was "smart." Maybe they had guessed correctly that they were in the "low" group. Maybe they just did not like the change.
Regardless, they had to tell me something I should have understood on my own. But I was so caught up with keeping my job that I forgot to do my job. I don't teach reading, math, or social studies. I teach children. Listening comes with the territory, and if I do not stop to hear them, they have no reason to stop and hear me.
