Failure Story

The last year (like every year, I suppose) has been full of failures. It has had its successes, too, of course, and even the failures may themselves reveal or allow new and different successes, so this is no miserable admission. Still, as a new teacher in a deeply troubled school district, faced with chaos and with essentially no administrative support, reality demanded constant adjustment of methods and goals, and it presented frequent disappointments.

Maybe the greatest and most obvious failure is evident in the look of the next year: I am not returning to the same school district. I don’t know if that fact alone represents a failure, or if it is rather the result of some failure or of some collection of them; in any case, it has been for me a cause of both sorrow and relief, and however I explain or justify my leaving, it stinks of disappointment.

Enumerating reasons for my decision to leave that district is not a satisfying task. All teachers have hard jobs, and the Mississippi Teacher Corps places teachers where they will have extraordinarily hard jobs. What can I describe that I hadn’t heard about before I came, that I didn’t expect? We all join the Teacher Corps anticipating difficulties, maybe even (somewhat perversely) hoping for them, as we expect them to present novel experiences and formative challenges, even opportunities to do good. What can I describe that I haven’t heard about from other teachers in this program, other teachers who are staying and have stayed in their districts and lived with the difficulties? Is that the failure? Am I complaining too much, and being weaker than so many of my peers?

The principal quit a week before school began. The superintendent didn’t last much longer, getting suspended and then dismissed under suspicious circumstances. The new principal, hired at the last minute, was the most constantly and universally hostile person I have ever known. She battled with the best teachers, compelled some fine students (with some of the school’s most sophisticated parents) to leave for other districts, and screamed constantly at everyone, at students, at teachers. The most problematic students would keep returning to my room, while the ones who had never been in trouble for anything would be suspended for chewing gum. Of course bells rang erratically and I had no access to a copier, making classes last unpredictably 45 or 75 minutes and requiring me to administer tests on an overhead projector or dry-erase board. But I think I could have dealt with these things. I don’t think these things would have made me leave. But the screaming! The constant, terrible hostility! On days when she was off-campus, the lightness was palpable. Everyone was happier.

Should I have stayed? It was widely believed (correctly, it turns out) that she wouldn’t be returning as principal (being promoted to the central office). It might have gotten better. Over the summer I saw students in town, chatted with them on the street or in the grocery store. I sometimes felt in those moments that I should have stayed, and that leaving was failure. I am going to another school that serves many poor students, but it has a significantly more competent administration, an administration that is not hostile; and I am going where I have friends (I was alone in the previous community, and very lonely). I felt like my presence, my mere presence, may have been beneficial to many of my students, and I feel bad to leave them. I felt like most of whatever benefit they took from me was despite their being in school and not because of it. I wish I could have had more failures with them, and through failures maybe some greater degree of success, but I felt thwarted by the circumstances. I hated getting up to go back every morning.

I am trying to keep in contact with some of my students, and I am going where there are similar students but better circumstances. My whole experience in that school is stained by failure, but I expect such failure to inform new and better success.

I expect that a year of teaching will always contain many little success (and many little failures), so long as one allows oneself to notice them. Allowing oneself to notice them isn’t always so easy to do, especially when they seem dimmed by the magnitude of their corresponding failures, but they’re there for noticing when the mood improves.

Most successes, or at least the most noticeable ones, or the ones we’re most inclined to care at all about, involve individual students. That’s probably as much a function of what we care about as it is of where our successes lie. Nobody, so far as I know, wants to teach in order to improve test scores, and such successes are only valuable to most of us since they represent collections of little successes, each one with an individual student.

It’s hard to pick one of those little successes to elevate above the others. I had students who aggravated me from moments after meeting them, but whom I came to love. I had students who brought discipline problems into my classroom, but who brought them less and less as the year went on – some of them eventually bringing none at all. There are the students who email me now, and who tell me they’re sad I left their school. (Most of them never brought any significant problems to my room, and were just pleased to be around a competent adult who was eager to push them.)

“J.” sticks out in my mind. He wasn’t especially poorly behaved, but not especially well behaved either. He was in my most tiring class, with a lot of kids who were or who thought they were too old or too uninterested or too tough to give much of a damn about anything in school, least of all grammar and literature, and there a lot of problems resulted. J. would get drawn into them sometimes. He would talk a lot, and say sarcastic things. I thought he had a sense of superiority, and it gave him a difficult attitude sometimes, but his sense wasn’t wholly inaccurate. He was exceptionally smart, would see things and understand things that were beyond his classmates. I suppose very smart people constantly faced with foolishness, arbitrariness, and incompetence may tend toward senses of superiority, and distance.

He normally did not need to be disciplined, especially compared to many of his classmates, but when he did he reacted harshly to it. He would talk when he shouldn’t, he would break other rules, and he would be bitterly angry when I said anything about it. Many times I talked to him in the hall, or got him to stay after school, and made clear to him that I recognized his intelligence and respected it. He didn’t really read much, which was ordinary, but I learned that he was unashamed to admit publicly when he did, and even that he sometimes liked it. This was not so ordinary. I sometimes tried to push books on him, things that I liked when I was in high school, and he never cared to take them; but he didn’t suggest that the idea was absurd, and even seemed to appreciate the offers.

In the last week of school, when finals were done and grades were in and the students knew it, and when, therefore, hardly any of them showed up, J. was in my room almost every period, almost every day. What few kids were around wandered the halls freely, and looked for teachers who would let them play cards or hook up video games in their rooms (I wouldn’t). J. spent a lot of that week in my room, with a few others who wandered in and out. I taught them sudoku, and we watched movies that I thought were worth their time. (Several kids showed up for The Chronicles of Narnia and word-of-mouth spread quickly about Whalerider; only J. sat through Casablanca.) We talked about the news, and the school, and about the town and county. We talked a little about languages and about mathematics. I thought that week was extraordinary, and that the teaching I did then was some of the most valuable that I could do. The week was successful, and though I don’t expect ever to hear from him again, it showed me how successful I’d been with J.

Reflecting on the summer school experience

I should probably tell any stray reader who doesn’t know: participants in the Mississippi Teacher Corps (like me, for instance) are enrolled in coursework to earn a master’s degree, and as a part of that coursework, during this, the second summer, we teach at a summer school. Now, last year the second-years did not teach at a summer school, and just in the last few months the requirement was added – other courses pushed back and making a heavier load later – to great surprise and dramatic effect. My reaction to the new requirement fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum formed by my colleagues: I was neither eager nor outraged. I did feel the touch of injustice: we accepted the terms of a course of work and the terms were changed after they had been accepted. It seemed to me to be bad form for the Teacher Corps, dubiously ethical, and to the extent that we had entered into a contract, I wondered if it were even legal. (Though, as I have learned in Mississippi, everything’s legal if nobody cares enough to pursue it.)

I hadn’t looked very closely at the fine print, though. I had no idea, upon entering, what the requirements for the degree even were. I came here to see the rural South, to have adventures, to get to know my country better. To collect stories to bore my grandchildren with. Those of my colleagues who had cared enough to scrutinize the requirements before arriving had a better position from which to moan, it seemed to me. And it was clear that the intentions were pure: our “in the field” training was abysmal last summer, and this would be an extraordinary opportunity for the next group of first years and for the future of the program. Some group has to get the short end of both sticks (no benefit from superior training itself, but burden of helping in training for the next group). And where somebody must suffer, it may as well be us as anybody.

So I went into it feeling about like that. And I guess I still do feel about like that, if maybe seeing the glass somewhat more half-full rather than merely appreciating both its half-emptiness and half-fullness at once, which is more my habit. I have enjoyed the month, more or less. It was a hell of a lot easier than the year had been, and the first-years did most of the work. I can see how much better off they are than I was (so much!), and I know how much more enjoyable this was than the classes at Ole Miss we’d probably have had in their stead. Of course, we’ll still have most of those classes, and I hope they’ll be better than some of those we’ve had before; but I’m not too worked up about their being postponed. Holly Springs Summer School ’06, despite some failures (notably a lack of administrative presence and a scheduling failure that resulted in 20 daily minutes of please-figure-something-out-teachers-because-somebody-screwed-up time), has been a positive experience.

My biggest challenge this year, or maybe it was a constellation of challenges, was that of my administration. I was faced at times with understandable failures, at times with failures that were difficult to understand, at times with failures that appeared to result from incompetence. We had lunatic policies like twenty minutes of silent sustained reading – a great idea on its own! – that were to be the last twenty minutes of 7th period. Actually, they ended five minutes before 7th period ended, so it took up 25 of 7th period’s 55 minutes every day, so that students had for only 30 minutes whatever 55 minute class they happened to have at the end of the day. It would have been great if we had merely shaved a few minutes from each period, but that would require a bell schedule that rang at odd times, and our bell rang when a secretary pushed the button (at VERY odd times), so such was an impossible solution. Getting rid of half of one period arbitrarily was better, apparently.

And that bell! The bell to end 5th period rang ten or fifteen minutes late almost every day, which made for one unusually long period and one unusually short one. At my regular prodding, the principal insisted from the start of the year that a new, automated bell system was a priority, that it would come in weeks or months. Of course it never did. And since it rang at the caprice of the secretaries, nobody even knew whether classes started at the hour and ended five minutes before the next hour, or ended at the hour and started five minutes after. So when we were to take our classes to the auditorium at, say, one o’clock, are we supposed to take our class that ENDS at one o’clock give-or-take five minutes, or the class that BEGINS at one o’clock give-or-take five minutes? Nobody knew, and there was chaos, and a decent principal could have fixed it for all future assemblies with one quick decision, but that decision was never made. So it was always chaos. And chaos was met with anger and hostility.

The hostility! The constant, grating hostility! The weekly faculty meetings that took the life out of me, that were sitting down and being yelled at for half an hour!

And we didn’t get regular access to a copy machine until March. I taught a state-tested subject (with no support – I was placed in a classroom with students and told to raise test scores), and again and again I would find materials and resources for test preparation and again and again I would find them useless without access to a copier. Almost all of my tests were on overheads or written on the board. When the test was weeks away, and we were asked what help we needed to prepare for the tests, told that the administration would get us whatever we needed, we asked for a substitute teacher for a week so that we could have two members of the English department working with the test-takers in smaller groups. We were promised it. We never got it.

I never actually saw a substitute teacher in the building. If a teacher was out, his students sat in the library or another teacher’s room. All we could do was try not to be out.

In many ways that characterized my experience. Just be there. Sometimes all I can do, the best I can do, the best I’m allowed to do, is to be there.

(I’m going to bend this assignment a little, and contrast several “units” that varied in their degrees of success. I hope it serves the purpose of the assignment – the spirit if not the letter – by providing an opportunity to reflect on the diverse factors that make such a thing effective or not.)

I had resolved before the school year began that all of my students would read, or would attempt to read, quite a lot; and when I learned that I would have an honors class, I became especially determined to get them reading much and often. The selection I found when I got there, however, was somewhat disappointing. I wrote before (elsewhere in this blog) about the Ellison. I wanted to strike a balance between seriousness of literature and immediacy of student interest. I’m not inclined to load up on 20th century African American literature, since the literary tradition that my students have inherited (if only they knew!) is so enormous and so rich, and I’m afraid of limiting it. But, on the other hand, I didn’t expect it to be easy to convince them to own Homer or Shakespeare. Both are theirs to own, every bit as rightfully as Langston Hughes or Maya Angelou, but they might not be as immediately sympathetic. So for our first book I wanted to acquaint my honors class with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: one of the most important novels about the 20th century African American experience, and deeply referential, richly complex, difficult and beautiful. Thankfully our book cabinet (which we have instead of a book room, as I think I wrote in a previous post), though it doesn’t have much, did have a bunch of copies. Not enough, of course, but when I combined that resource with those of every public library in Panola County, and drove to Oxford for one more copy (every publicly available copy in the county, plus one!), we had enough for the class.

So we read the Ellison. All told, it went well. A lot of the kids were engaged; a few loved it. Of course a few couldn’t be compelled to read the damn thing. A lot read it and were confused. I tried to make up for it with classroom conversations, and had some mixed success.

After that our selections were mostly determined by the contents of the book cabinet. We read Death of a Salesman, and the places they went with it! So much further than with the Ellison! I don’t know how the cultural monolithists would explain that, but despite the “white” suburban angst, it was easy to read and juicy – sex and anger and suicide – and our experience with it was more successful overall than was our experience with Ellison.

The most successful of all, though, was our unit on Elie Wiesel’s Night – presumably further still from the cultural experience of my students. But, again, it wasn’t too hard to read, we could do a lot of the work together in class, the Holocaust is shocking and horrible, the depiction graphic, and the connections – to injustice, brutality, fear, intimidation, slavery and servitude, ownership of oneself and one’s own fate – were very readily made. It might have helped that, just as we selected Night for our class, Oprah selected it for her book club. I may have benefited from her credibility with some of my honors girls.