I feel ______ when _____

By the 40th minute of class I threw my arms up in the air and my body down on a chair. It took me a few seconds to reconnect with where I was and with my role there. That’s when I decided to verbalize my feelings to the loud, energetic second-graders in front of me – still making use of the sentence frames we were working with last week: “I feel frustrated when I am trying to explain something to the 2nd grade students and they are talking at the same time, or climbing the table, or kicking one another.”

Some of the kids hadn’t even noticed I had sat down, and they looked at me in surprise, as if my frustration seemed absurd to them. What had they done?

What they had done

This group is requiring all my energy to make lessons happen. When I think “Oh, now I got this!” they surprise me. Yesterday, by the end of class, a boy was sleeping on the floor, while another was choking a classmate, and another was telling me that someone was chewing gum. All that after I had already confiscated a couple marbles, been smeared with a girl’s creamy chapstick that came in a little pouch resembling fast food ketchup, been accused by a second girl to have touched her hair with my chapsticky hand, and been introduced to the sweet newly-arrived-to-school Olivia – “Can she be in my group?” “No! In mine!” “No, I am in her classroom!”

I love it when they love it

I have been trying different strategies, contextualizing the classes with subjects of their interest, and teaching them language they should actually be using in their lives outside the classroom, and outside the school. What happens when I hit the bullseye is that the students get so excited that they stop hearing me. They jump up and down, they run around, they yell with joy. And the craziest of all is that I smile when I see that reaction.

“I like it because it is good”

I need, however, to find a way to harness all that passion and redirect it towards learning what they must know: to speak their own language in a coherent stream of words that is more than basic. My mission with this group is to get their English to a higher level of precision and to get their thinking to grasp ideas more complex than “I like it because it is good”.

Community

For the time being, I have established another goal. Simpler in theory, but extremely complex with my little crowd, I am determined to build a sense of community, in which “Who is the leader of the table?” is less important than “How will we tackle this task as a group?”

A new experience

And then today I was asked to sub in the Life Skills room for 30 minutes because the teacher was late. What a totally different educational world it is! The Life Skills room serves children whose impairments or disabilities impede their participation in regular classrooms, as they require a completely different program – to be more exact, development of life skills rather than informational learning. The environment, the challenges faced by the children, and the type of support needed from the teachers made me remember my Early Childhood days – which are not that far away, but seem to have happened years ago.

I ponder and I wonder

As I interacted with children who needed constant reminding of not tossing toys, of asking before yanking something out of someone else’s hand, and of staying in the classroom, I pondered what the goals were for each one of those students. I also wondered how the teachers determine how far they can go, how much they can learn. But, above all, it dawned on me that this is one of my weaknesses: this level of difficulty – the lack of evolution or the extremely slow pace of development – could paralyze me as an educator. As I became involved with one of the children, taking the time to establish a rapport and be extremely attentive to capture any response I might get, I suspected some of those students could not make that type of connection.

Give and take x Give and give

I am thankful for the gifted teachers who find their call to teach such children, and I admire them immensely. My inspiration for teaching day after day, for waking up early, working over hours and dedicating my personal time to planning is fed by children’s response to my effort. I need something back from my students so I can gauge my progress and determine the next course of action. I cannot imagine what it would be like to work this hard not having this response. Maybe these teachers are more altruistic than I am, and they are able to give. Just give.