Yesterday was another good/bad one. I kept an upbeat mood for the first part of the day, but my lunchtime class was very unruly coming back from the cafeteria, with one little girl extremely aggressive and loud toward another (there was a lot of jostling and line cutting among the small group that wants to be "first", whether they arrive first or not). This created a poisonous environment in class, and basically no teaching, children applauding the aggressive girl who announced loudly that her mother taught her to hit somebody if they messed with her, even though that goes against everything we teach in school (go figure, a parent undermining the important social and moral teachings of the school).
I have the teaching. I have the classroom management. I don't have any buy-in from many of my students, and they don't care whether they are good or bad, rewarded or punished, get good grades or bad. And it is affecting me, and I am floundering and becoming numb and uncaring.
On a positive note, I made an appointment with a therapist for next week, and I looked up the requirements for getting a math certification added to my license (21 hours, but all can be done online, two classes maximum during the school year and four in the summer). In theory it could take as little as a year, then I could teach any grade, should I choose to continue to teach.
That is the rub. Do I want to be a teacher, knowing that these problems exist and will continue to exist, no matter the grade, no matter the subject, no matter the location? Do I want to invest a year and thousands of dollars in a career that is being undermined and dragged down by politicians and bureaucrats who see teaching as equivalent to building a car - a production line that takes 12 years to spit out a product, no matter what raw materials are fed in. More and more I am leaning to "no" - but is that because I am mentally ill, and incapable of job satisfaction, unable to cope and ignore the little things?
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