14

14 hour day yesterday. Arriving at the high school at 7:00AM, doing the student teacher thing, and then staying through the end of parent/teacher conferences was a bit of a struggle. I wasn't told that my mentor is typically the last to finish his conferences, well past the allotted time. I guess it comes with the territory -- he teaches three AP classes and two history classes that students need to graduate. While sitting next to him and shuffling progress reports, I looked around the gymnasium and noticed that his queue was easily the longest. I attribute this to two things:

1. AP classes are hard, and many parents are concerned about their kids' grades
2. my mentor teacher scoffs at the "6 minute conference" rule.

Regarding the second point, I support his decision. You can't cut off a worried parent nor try to get through to a kid in front of his parents in 6 minutes. Let's face it, if it took just 6 minutes for students to be metacognitive about their behavior and study habits, a lot of students would not be failing. Sometimes I think that the teenage mind is in a chrysalis-like state. Their identities are still manifesting inside of some hard and crinkled cocoon. The problem is, it can be hard to get through to them because you somehow have to penetrate said cocoon. Also, that is the second reference to cocoons I have used on this blog. Happy Cocoon Day.

I was thankful to see the whole spectrum: the aggressive, "why-is-my-perfect-child-failing-your-class," "i-can-do-a-better-job-than-you" parent; the misbehaving kid who thinks he is hotter than magma, accompanied by his take-no-nonsense mother (My mentor really leaned into him. Best line: "What you do doesn't just reflect on you. When you do bad, you don't just make yourself look bad, you make your mom look bad, and everyone else who wants to see you succeed. You don't want to do that, do you?" SMOKED.); the conference where the kid is so worried about his grades and his parents' reactions that he bursts into tears; and the three minute chat with the parent of the kid with the highest grade in her class.

I hate to add another hat to the pile, but as a teacher it is completely necessary to be a diplomat. We need to be able to diffuse potentially volatile parents but still stand our ground and communicate that there are certain things that their child needs to comes to terms with before they can be successful. We need to have the savvy to convince a poor student to change his ways, cut the crap, but still inspire them to persevere. We need the empathy to build up the confidence of the kid who is failing, to make them understand that regardless of the letter grade they are receiving, we believe in them and know they can improve, as long as they keep trying.

Keep trying. My brother sent me this link the night before my fourteen-hour day, when I was up exceedingly late wracking my brain over just how I was going to teach about the Muslim caliphates. In a nutshell (or a cocoon, maybe), it's about how success often does not come without failure. The money line is at the end:

But despite their many advantages, Randolph isn’t yet convinced that the education they currently receive at Riverdale, or the support they receive at home, will provide them with the skills to negotiate the path toward the deeper success that Seligman and Peterson hold up as the ultimate product of good character: a happy, meaningful, productive life. Randolph wants his students to succeed, of course — it’s just that he believes that in order to do so, they first need to learn how to fail.

I can't tell you how much this struck me. Maybe because I understand the gravity of that lesson -- the first-hand experience of failure, and then, the process by which we dust ourselves off and find the necessary strength to rise above.

So I went in that day, ready to teach about the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the qualities of a good empire, and the reason why empires fall. I made a handout. Also, I completely bombed it. It was awful. If you don't believe me, I recorded it. Yes, there is a video record of me failing to teach why empires fail. This lesson had many levels.

But I took that failure, and over the next two hours, tweaked the lesson, and come 4th hour, I was able to reach my teaching objective. The kids knew what I was trying to make them understand, and the best part about it was, I didn't tell them what I wanted them to know. They figured it out on their own.

It was weird then, talking to their parents later that day during conferences. Well, I actually didn't say anything. My mentor did all the talking. But if I did say something, I would have told my 4th hour students that the lesson today was the result of me failing. By failing, I was able to troubleshoot my weaknesses, and then go back and repair them. School -- heck, life in general -- ain't about succeeding. It's about improvement. We must measure our worth not by how high we go, but how far we have come.

And to my 1st hour students, I would have told them I'm sorry. And to read their textbook.