I have no idea what I’m doing. No idea.<\/p>\n
When I close that door, I’m on my own. I’ve got fifty-three minutes with a group of thirty kids who want entertainment if they want anything. I need to take those kids wherever they are and help them improve by the time they walk out the door. I need to give them at least one new idea today and one reason to come back tomorrow.<\/p>\n
I have no idea what I’m doing.<\/p>\n
My first year of teaching, I was too frantic to worry about this. If an idea looked good, I did it. You have a packet of Poe stories and a week-long lesson plan for them? Sign me up. A set of Longfellow poems that end in a presentation? Hand ’em over.<\/p>\n
There’s reason to teach Poe and Longfellow, but I was just teaching them to fill time with what seemed to be worthy material. I hadn’t been thinking about the way students would benefit from what I presented to them.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t until my third year that I really started to scratch my head. “Um, why do this project with Poe? What do the students get from it? I’m just asking ’cause…” That’s when I started to give more thought to the time I asked my students to spend with anything. And for the past 6 years or so, I’ve been suffering this existential crisis, wondering why I’m here, why I’m at the front of the classroom and not in a seat in the back somewhere.<\/p>\n
The good thing is that I do know a few things. I know better now what I want out of my students and why I want that out of them. But, specifically, why am I teaching Hawthorne, Whitman, Thoreau, and Fitzgerald? Shakespeare, Sophocles, Plato, and Kafka? Because we have them. Nothing more.<\/p>\n
What am I doing to make my students better writers, readers, speakers, and thinkers? Beyond just giving them more chances to practice those skills, pointing out where they can improve, patting on the back when they do well, how am I helping my students?<\/p>\n
I have no idea what I’m doing.<\/p>\n
Here’s the scary thing: this job almost demands that you get to a point where you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s the only monitor to let you know you’re even trying to improve.<\/p>\n
Any teacher could walk in the door, press “play,” and collect the same paycheck as the teacher who regularly puts in 80-hour weeks planning, grading, and preparing. So you’ve only got yourself to rely on. It’s that nagging feeling that urges you to do better than you’ve been doing, but never gives you the satisfaction of knowing that you’re even doing an OK job, let alone a good one.<\/p>\n
I have no idea what I’m doing. I really don’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have no idea what I’m doing. No idea. When I close that door, I’m on my own. I’ve got fifty-three minutes with a group of thirty kids who want entertainment if they want anything. I need to take those kids wherever they are and help them improve by the time they walk out the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[29],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":529,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions\/529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}