[back from the dead]
No, I haven’t forgotten about this blog. But yes, I haven’t written in over a month. I don’t really have an excuse besides being lazy. It’s also been an interesting month – personally though, not particularly at school.
As the school year comes to an end, I am forced to reflect as I frantically try to put together my portfolio and teaching long that I have diligently (not) kept up with since October. As I go through my lesson plans, I find myself thinking, “wait, really? I thought of that?” It’s generally followed by, “wow, I could’ve done that better…” but alas, what am I going to do.
I just went through my old blog posts and am really feeling that I need to be better at this for the next four weeks. It’s amazing what kind of reflection and insight I can have in a blog post. I’ve often considered writing as a form of therapy for me – especially since I’m that type of person who is incapable of spilling my guts to every person I walk by (it’s not necessarily a quality I strive for either, just in case you were wondering). So I write. Er… Type. I type faster than I think, so it’s a win-win situation on all fronts.
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on “fairness” in the classroom. With two classes with such distinct personalities, the way I interact and my general happiness in the two classes often vary – I tend to be happier in the nicer class room and more frustrated in the more difficult classroom.
Being the perfectionist that I am, I gave myself a hard time in the beginning of the year trying to treat both classes the same. Then at one point, I realized that I was much better off just accepting the fact that each class has it’s own life and resistance would be futile.
Acceptance. That was the key word.
But it isn’t always easy.
A month ago, I was trying to set up groups for a religion project that they were going to work on. They got to write down their preferences and my goal was to create groups that may not socially always make sense, but would be unified under a common interest. The task proved much easier with one class over the other. With the harder class, there seemed to be now way of setting up the groups so that each group would succeed. No matter what, there was always one or two groups that would be set up for failure just because of who they were grouped with.
Finally after struggling for a while, I accepted the groups that I made. I had 24 kids in the class – half of which often come up in teacher meetings. It was what it was.
Was it fair for the struggling kids who got stuck with other struggling kids? Probably not. But at the same time, perhaps this is a chance for those who were never given the chance (because we assume that they are under performers thus subconsciously always placing them in a non-challenging environment) to lead.
The results were varied. Some groups surprised me and some performed as expected.
But by taking off the pressure from myself, the high performing kids who had been striving to work with other high performing kids got a chance to engage in quality work. The kids who needed a chance to lead go to lead. And those who struggled, still struggled – but at least now I could differentiate even more clearly than before who were actually struggling and who were just lazy. I already had a good idea of that from the beginning of the year, but it’s always good to re-gauge that notion later in the year to allow space for the kid to grow.
I sometimes have to remind myself that given that this is my first year of teaching, sometimes I need to give myself a break. This means trying something even if you don’t know the results (wait, isn’t that sort of the definition of “try”?). How will I know if this is a fair or reasonable approach if I don’t try it?
Then there’s that internal struggle with myself who feels that I am doing a disservice to my students if I try something and it fails. But chances are, they aren’t going to be able to tell the difference. They’ll rememberer the time I put a chair in middle of the class and asked them to write the history of the chair. Or when they had to be Aristotle on a witness stand. Hopefully those memories will grossly out weigh the time I may have “screwed them over” by assigning them to a difficult group. Then again, we can’t always choose our colleagues, right?
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As I finish up this school year, I am going to start a new project. I think I’ll start it tomorrow since there’s no reason for me to wait. But that also means you won’t know what it is until tomorrow.
So for now, I’m going to say hasta luego, see you soon, and now I’m going to go watch Thor.
