Failure Story
It’s hard to pick out a particular “failure story” from the varied and expansive landscape of failure that was my first year of teaching. It’s hard not just because I look back at my teaching this past year critically and see a lot of failure; it’s also hard because I see how interconnected any discrete shortcoming on my part was with my students’ mistakes, with others of my own, with the myriad injustices of my situation or theirs, and even with my conscious decisions to prioritize some aspects of my job over others. Perhaps it’s my ability to rationalize nearly anything to myself, but I can’t pick out one student, or one specific responsibility I had, and say, “I failed her” or “I failed to do this,” without also seeing where “she failed me,” or “the system failed us both,” or how “I failed to do this because I was also failing somewhere else,” or even “I failed to do this because I was too busy succeeding in this other way.” And all that qualification clearly wouldn’t make for a good story.
Objectively speaking, I think it would be inaccurate to name a particular student my “failure story”; it’s like the converse of the messianic teacher impulse (“I can save a kid myself”) that I try to check in myself. There’s a hidden pride there that I’m wary of. At the same time, I do think of some students as “my failures”—if nothing else, blaming myself alone lets me preserve the hope that my positive impact on students could be that substantial—and so a failure story does fit that subjective look at this past year.
“Ricky” was one of the most intelligent 7th graders I taught, which is to say that he was one of my most intelligent students across the board, as my 7th graders were almost all better readers and writers than my 8th graders. He read books at, and frequently above, his grade level, when many of his peers were reading at a third or fourth grade level. What’s more, he was unfailingly polite and willing to help, if a little shy.
I was delighted to have him in my class, but at the beginning of the year I was far too busy putting out classroom management fires to give him much attention. Thankfully, he seemed mature and self-motivated enough to not require much on my part other than giving him the opportunity to learn. I still felt a little guilty knowing that he wasn’t getting the individual attention or even the well-run classroom that he deserved, because I was trying to handle his classmates, who were busy eating paper, trying to blow pencil shavings at each other, or making sound effects for everything they did. My guilt was only exacerbated by the fact that this was a class of seven students. How could I be this harried with such a small class?
Things didn’t improve with Ricky’s classmates for a while, but for the first semester he endured the chaos of sixth period without complaint. Around the beginning of the second semester, which is embarassingly late (but better than never, I suppose), I finally started making headway with the three discipline cases in the class. That progress came with a cost, though. I’d tried many management strategies with Ricky’s class, and the first thing that showed any signs of working was to take a much more authoritarian (not authoritative) tone with the students—to edge closer to the verbal violence that so many of my students expected from authority figures. In picking the first thing that seemed to work, rather than the one that was best, I ended up straining my relationships with all of the students in Ricky’s class, Ricky included. Class took on a negative tone, and while students would usually do their work, they did it with a scowl on their face and with no motivation to work beyond the minimum requirements. Where before class disruptions would seem to spill over from my students’ excess energy, which I could tap for positive use in my lessons, now they were almost always negative—name-calling, verbal confrontations, and complaining.
From my one year’s experience, 8th graders seem to improve in attitude over the course of the year, while 7th graders seem to get worse, so I wasn’t completely surprised when Ricky started getting caught up in the same negativity as his peers. I was disappointed, though, having seen how mature and self-possessed he’d been earlier in the year. When he started complaining and insulting other students too, I came down hard on him, just like I did with the others, but it only served to antagonize him more. The last straw was, in effect, our final unit in his class, in which we read Monster, a book he’d read a year ago. He complained from the beginning about having to do the same thing over again, and I—burnt out from the year and generally disinclined to let a student from his class do anything other than exactly what I had planned for them—told him that he would have to do the same work as everyone else and that he might find some value in re-reading. When I got around to it (which is to say, rarely), I would plan some alternative, higher-level thinking questions for him to answer about our daily reading, but for the most part, I just let him sit in the back of the classroom, bored and barely pretending to follow along. With hardly any interest in the day’s lesson, he became as big a management problem as anyone else. The rest of the class, even the inveterate discipline problems, were relatively focused on the book, and in my relief at finding something that got them to shut up and participate constructively, I let Ricky slip into a role that should not have been his.
Ricky’s story isn’t a failure story in the sense that he came anywhere near failing my class—he passed with the highest grade. It’s a failure because, by the end of the year, he’d learned to associate English class with being bored, angry, and—to some extent—ignored.
I feel like I failed “Ricky,” but I also know that my failure wasn’t as simple as just not giving him enough attention, encouragement, or individualized instruction. The failure of my classroom management certainly helped turn his class’ environment so negative, but that environment was also shaped by things beyond my control, chiefly perhaps the hormonal tumult of the second semester of 7th grade. But while I’ll concede that Ricky’s transformation from self-motivated and mature to disaffected and apathetic wasn’t entirely my fault, I realize that claiming as my failure can be useful, if I let it remind me of my responsibilities to all of my students, even those who seem like they need me the least.
Objectively speaking, I think it would be inaccurate to name a particular student my “failure story”; it’s like the converse of the messianic teacher impulse (“I can save a kid myself”) that I try to check in myself. There’s a hidden pride there that I’m wary of. At the same time, I do think of some students as “my failures”—if nothing else, blaming myself alone lets me preserve the hope that my positive impact on students could be that substantial—and so a failure story does fit that subjective look at this past year.
“Ricky” was one of the most intelligent 7th graders I taught, which is to say that he was one of my most intelligent students across the board, as my 7th graders were almost all better readers and writers than my 8th graders. He read books at, and frequently above, his grade level, when many of his peers were reading at a third or fourth grade level. What’s more, he was unfailingly polite and willing to help, if a little shy.
I was delighted to have him in my class, but at the beginning of the year I was far too busy putting out classroom management fires to give him much attention. Thankfully, he seemed mature and self-motivated enough to not require much on my part other than giving him the opportunity to learn. I still felt a little guilty knowing that he wasn’t getting the individual attention or even the well-run classroom that he deserved, because I was trying to handle his classmates, who were busy eating paper, trying to blow pencil shavings at each other, or making sound effects for everything they did. My guilt was only exacerbated by the fact that this was a class of seven students. How could I be this harried with such a small class?
Things didn’t improve with Ricky’s classmates for a while, but for the first semester he endured the chaos of sixth period without complaint. Around the beginning of the second semester, which is embarassingly late (but better than never, I suppose), I finally started making headway with the three discipline cases in the class. That progress came with a cost, though. I’d tried many management strategies with Ricky’s class, and the first thing that showed any signs of working was to take a much more authoritarian (not authoritative) tone with the students—to edge closer to the verbal violence that so many of my students expected from authority figures. In picking the first thing that seemed to work, rather than the one that was best, I ended up straining my relationships with all of the students in Ricky’s class, Ricky included. Class took on a negative tone, and while students would usually do their work, they did it with a scowl on their face and with no motivation to work beyond the minimum requirements. Where before class disruptions would seem to spill over from my students’ excess energy, which I could tap for positive use in my lessons, now they were almost always negative—name-calling, verbal confrontations, and complaining.
From my one year’s experience, 8th graders seem to improve in attitude over the course of the year, while 7th graders seem to get worse, so I wasn’t completely surprised when Ricky started getting caught up in the same negativity as his peers. I was disappointed, though, having seen how mature and self-possessed he’d been earlier in the year. When he started complaining and insulting other students too, I came down hard on him, just like I did with the others, but it only served to antagonize him more. The last straw was, in effect, our final unit in his class, in which we read Monster, a book he’d read a year ago. He complained from the beginning about having to do the same thing over again, and I—burnt out from the year and generally disinclined to let a student from his class do anything other than exactly what I had planned for them—told him that he would have to do the same work as everyone else and that he might find some value in re-reading. When I got around to it (which is to say, rarely), I would plan some alternative, higher-level thinking questions for him to answer about our daily reading, but for the most part, I just let him sit in the back of the classroom, bored and barely pretending to follow along. With hardly any interest in the day’s lesson, he became as big a management problem as anyone else. The rest of the class, even the inveterate discipline problems, were relatively focused on the book, and in my relief at finding something that got them to shut up and participate constructively, I let Ricky slip into a role that should not have been his.
Ricky’s story isn’t a failure story in the sense that he came anywhere near failing my class—he passed with the highest grade. It’s a failure because, by the end of the year, he’d learned to associate English class with being bored, angry, and—to some extent—ignored.
I feel like I failed “Ricky,” but I also know that my failure wasn’t as simple as just not giving him enough attention, encouragement, or individualized instruction. The failure of my classroom management certainly helped turn his class’ environment so negative, but that environment was also shaped by things beyond my control, chiefly perhaps the hormonal tumult of the second semester of 7th grade. But while I’ll concede that Ricky’s transformation from self-motivated and mature to disaffected and apathetic wasn’t entirely my fault, I realize that claiming as my failure can be useful, if I let it remind me of my responsibilities to all of my students, even those who seem like they need me the least.
posted by LWS at 10:39 PM
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