I cannot very well “share a success [I] have had” (quoted from blog assignment sheet) since I neither know what success is or what it would look like. For most of my students it seems to mean leaving this place. I have wondered if it wouldn’t be success for my district to be absorbed into this county’s other (wealthier and more successful) school district. Or for the migration out of the Delta to be completed, leaving only cotton fields and robots to labor in them (which doesn’t often seem harder than bringing jobs and good educations in).
It’s fairly easy to come by stories of special exceptions, of gifted students, of one teacher who made a difference in one student’s life; and I will not denigrate these stories. I must see them, however, as a very particular species of success, since they are defined as exceptions. World-savers and knights errant encounter in the Teacher Corps a kind of cynicism that often seems realistic, or a kind of realism that often seems cynical, and I’m not wholly at odds with it. But I’m still unsure of our reduction of “success” into a series of anecdotes that we can use to motivate ourselves on rainy days. We have not one success, but a whole swarm of them! (Even pinned, literally, like dead bees and butterflies, on cork.) There is pragmatism to this view, but I wish some more time were allowed — pragmatic or not — to the collective consideration of what that one success would look like.
Like all the gold coins in the construction-paper chest that Mrs. Monroe has placed on our Board of Success, we each have our little collection of treasures (to return to her explicit metaphor, and backing away from the entomological one). And sure enough, they are nice on rainy days. It felt like a little treasure when a slew of students first thought of me for letters of recommendation to some academic club. It felt like a little treasure when a student who received unsolicited letters from admissions departments inviting her to consider their schools thought that I would be the teacher she’d ask about the quality of those schools and for advice about them. And when another student, who rode on the hood of a car during the Homecoming Parade giving everybody the mechanical wrist-motion-minimizing Miss America wave, broke out of it for a second to wave at me like a normal person waves. And there are so many students who were very troublesome and openly hostile to me who are now only slightly troublesome and usually not hostile. My fifth period can now usually get to and from the cafeteria without a constant threat of chaos.
The anecdotes surely are like little treasures in their own way, and there are many more of them. But I’m happy to live without the little reassurances, with whatever uncertainty or tragedy that requires, in order to keep that bigger kind of success unmuddied and to keep my foolish heart and eye searching for it.