WR-1, Advanced Proficiency, 11th Grade, English
Audio Transcript
Everyone said this would be the hardest year of my life and they were right. In the beginning I remember feeling completely overwhelmed. It felt like it was one insurmountable challenge after another. Literally every time I solved one problem something else came along to replace it. My good friend (also a first year teacher) and I realized early on that the only way we would survive was to rely on the “serenity prayer”—we would literally quote it to one another to remind each other: “…grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” It became our little joke but it helped. It may sound silly but it was a constant reminder that some things were in my control and some things weren’t.
The first thing I realized that wasn’t in my control was how far behind my students were, but I knew it was my job to change that. By the time they reached 11th grade they had had so much time to fall behind—but instead of being discouraged and angry about it, I just accepted that we would all have to hard to see the kind of growth my students deserved. Their reading and writing skills were shockingly inadequate. I knew our 60-minute class periods were not going to offer enough time to get them to pass the end of year test that was required for graduation. So I identified the students in each class who seemed most at risk of failing and set up required tutoring sessions for them, held after school and on weekends. I had to meet with many of their family members to ensure their support but those sessions proved crucial. I just don’t know how else I would have had the time to catch them up and shore up their remedial skills.
The other major challenge was dealing with large numbers of student absences. In some cases the students were just not invested in school—they just stopped caring about coming. To provide more motivation, I track and post attendance for each of my classes and I’ve turned it into a competition amongst them and that’s helped tremendously. In other situations there was family pressure to either stay home to provide childcare or to get a job to help earn money. I had one student who was constantly skipping school every time he could get an odd job with his uncle’s construction crew because his mother needed him to help pay the rent. It’s hard to get involved in family situations like this, but I basically met with the mother and I told her that I understood the need for the money but that in the long run it was in both her family’s and her son’s interest for her son to get a diploma and that he would not graduate without passing my class. I got her to agree to stop asking him to take school hour work shifts. And on my recommendation she spoke to her brother to arrange for evening and weekend shifts for her son. He’s no longer missing school and it’s made all the difference for him. I’ve just discovered over and over again that there are usually solutions to these types of problems—they’re just not always evident right away.
I’d have to say that the biggest challenge I faced this year have been the lockdowns in my high school. Because of a variety of ongoing problems we’ve had them all year long, roughly every three weeks. The lockdowns prevent students from passing between periods and relegate them to the same classroom for an entire day. Most of the teachers in my school look at the lockdowns as an inconvenience to be tolerated, and see the challenge as how to keep the keep students entertained (by watching a movie, playing class games, etc.).
Early on it occurred to me that these lockdowns presented a real opportunity in the form of extra instruction time. I realized that lockdown days presented a unique chance for students to master more than an entire week’s worth of objectives in one day. At first my students felt cheated—they knew that other classrooms were getting to just watch movies or play games or get free time, so I had to sell them on the idea. But with creative pitching and by igniting a little competitive fire (and explaining how far ahead of the other classes they’d be) they started to understand and be excited by the fact that without the seven-minute passing periods they would gain an entire period of instruction. They started to see the upside of lockdowns.
Whenever these lockdowns would happen, I would basically end up using every lesson left in my unit to keep students engaged for the entire day. It was exhausting and it felt like an academic marathon but it was also incredibly satisfying. I kind of secretly looked forward to those days sometimes because we just got so much accomplished. I think my students felt really inspired after those days. I know I did. There was just no denying what we could do.