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More often than not, I feel like what I do as a teacher doesn’t matter. Progress feels so agonizingly slow or nonexistent, and it feels like you’re just a babysitter instead of someone teaching the content. I feel like a complete fraud every single day, and some stranger off the bus could probably teach better than me. The same students who weren’t writing a sentence last week are still not writing a sentence. Your classroom still feels the same as it did at the very start of your first year. It’s a cycle, and not a very romantic one either, one of stagnancy where you can work as hard as you want and still feel like there’s no progress.
Sometimes, despite our intentions when we came into the profession, it doesn’t feel like we make a difference anymore. And it’s not like we actually aren’t making a difference. When you do a job like teaching, working with kids every single day, growth is not linear or immediate. As much as we wished it was, sometimes it takes months, if not years to truly make a difference. Unlike those Hollywood teacher movies, miracles tend not to happen — at least usually not overnight.
But then there are the moments, and usually the super small moments that made me realize I did and I am making a difference. As a 9th-grade special education teacher in Baltimore City, I work to bring students with intellectual disabilities, ADHD, autism, emotional disabilities, and processing deficits to higher literacy levels. The test scores are only one part of the job, but one of my students has raised his reading level from a Kindergarten reading level to a 6th grade reading level.
Of course, as a teacher, like a coach, you have to be wary about taking any credit for a student’s success. Students take credit for their success — after all, they’re the ones making the progress to begin with. But this kid asked me last week whether I would be his teacher next year. I told him I most likely wouldn’t — he would be moving up to the 10th grade, and I am a 9th-grade teacher. He asked “why?” — I just had to explain to him that was how it is. Maybe in some off chance, I would get moved to teach sophomores next year, but I still most likely would not be his teacher.
It was a small but very meaningful classroom moment for me, and all of it on Zoom to begin with. This is the kid who responded “Percy Jackson” when I asked the class “what’s your favorite movie?” As a lifelong fan of the Percy Jackson books, I asked him if he’d ever read them. He said no — I set out to change that. I think the movies are inferior to the books, for one, but I realized it was an opportunity to encourage reading outside the classroom as well. Now, he just asked me how he could get the third book of the series, and I’m more than happy to buy it for him.
Another parent told me I was the first teacher who really cared about her daughter, ever since they moved to Baltimore. Some parents constantly thank me for the support of doing home visits, delivering wifi boxes, computers, work packets, and just constantly checking in on kids. For a time, there was one student I got to come to class by calling his mom every day to wake him up. I asked my students what the Holocaust was last week in reviewing the Israel-Palestine conflict, and very few of my students knew what it was. A couple more heard the name “Hitler” before, but I took a lesson to go off the lesson plan and give a presentation and answer questions about the Holocaust.
And besides the one student who went from Kindergarten to 6th grade on his reading scores, other kids have had significant growth too — some have gone from first grade to third grade or third grade to fifth grade. Of course I want all my kids to be reading on grade level or better, but growth is growth.
Without getting into the weeds of how much some students have grown, sometimes it’s the most difficult kids who you really make a difference with. Almost every teacher cares and very few are just out there just collecting a paycheck, or at least very few started that way. I’ve had kids come to me who struggle with phonics and can’t match some letters to sounds, at the high school level. I’ve had kids who can’t read in the 9th grade.
“How did your older teachers fail you so much? How did the system fail you?” I ask.
But these were not bad teachers. I realize they were teachers just like me, doing everything they possibly could to bridge academic and systemic gaps in students’ education and trying to work miracles, only to realize we were all only human. Despite how much I personally struggled, there are kids who still ask me for help with technology.
I can’t tell the success stories without giving you a CV of my failures and sins as a teacher: I could barely manage a classroom my first year. A student hit his head against the window in my class. I couldn’t protect some of my kids from bullying and harassment. At one point, a student grabbed a pair of scissors from my room to go threaten another student in another class. My classroom has been the site of several altercations.
I have had three students on my roster get arrested. One was charged with first degree murder. I haven’t made every phone call I should have. I haven’t made every home visit I should have. I have been close to giving up on students after trying so hard and getting no results. I have given up on contacting some parents or guardians who never respond. Even if I didn’t realize it, I have played favorites. Some kids’ test scores didn’t get better — in fact, they got worse.
These are the horror stories that belie my stories of success. I wonder if I’m being dramatic or whether I should confess all those failures, but sweeping them under the rug is also not the answer. I have done the best I possibly could. But it’s usually not enough. It’s never enough.
Takeaways
So no, as a teacher, I don’t work miracles. But just when I feel like I’m just a babysitter, like nothing I do matters, like the fact that I’m standing in the front of the classroom or on the computer, in front of children, is one big joke, a sign comes that what I do does matter and make a difference, even if I don’t see it. And I hope you get those signs too. As a teacher, we have to come in every day, plan lessons, teach those lessons, grade, and because of all the work we put in, we want to see results.
Like any parent can tell you, working with kids does not work like that. Sometimes you can do everything right and things still don’t go the way you want. And as a teacher, when it doesn’t seem like you’re making any academic or behavioral progress, it feels like you’re failing at your job. If you tie enough of your identity to the job, it can feel like you’re a failure as a person.
My relationship to the calling of being a teacher has changed significantly since I started. I started the first couple months of my first year with a romantic idealism that I was going to change lives. After November to the end of that year, I proceeded on a devastating version of survival mode, thinking just showing up to work and making it through the day was a good day. Now, during the end of my second year, I have more ambivalence — I am certainly much better at my job, but I’m also more detached from it. Throughout both these years, there’s been a global pandemic that’s forced learning virtual and killed almost 600,000 Americans.
But, to my fellow teachers, just when you think nothing you do at work matters, I pray you reminisce or see a sign that you have made a difference and truly impacted your students’ lives.
This post also appears on Age of Awareness.
