sufficient

frustration

Yesterday was one of the crappiest days I have had at work in quite awhile and it had very little to do with the kids. In fact, with the kids, it was one of those days where I could see that they are eager to learn and even got a glimpse that they had learned something over the course of the semester. It was a glimpse I sorely needed after the morning I had.

It started on Thursday with a meeting I attended for 5 hours that got started half an hour late and spent about an hour actually on topic. Friday morning, during my planning period, I was at another meeting that added more work to my plate and pushed my frustration level to the point where I was ready to bang my head against a wall for a good long time.

The long and short of it were reaffirmations of the numbers of adults in education who don't actually care about education or are in utter denial as to the true state of things, as reflected in their actions. As my co-worker who had to listen to me said, "Laying a solution over a broken system is never going to work."

Said co-worker urged me to do what I could do in my classroom and just accept the rest of it as is. "You can't change everything," she said. The problem is, I want to change everything. I don't know how, but even after 5 years of working in this broken system, even with my conviction that humanity is totally depraved, I still have hope that things will be better, that most students will want to come to school and that they will have opportunities for real learning in each of their classes. I still have the hope that every school in the system will be able to provide this type of education for its students. I don't know why I still have this hope when the majority of the evidence is to the contrary.

Wouldn't it be easier to just accept the status quo and be apathetic? Probably, yes, but its just not an option for me. Reminders like 20% of people do 80% of the work everywhere are just not comforting. WHY? Why is it so broken? Why do people throw solutions at education and when they don't fix things miraculously in two years, move on to something else?! WHY? Why can't I just be content to be the best that I can in my classroom and teach the 165 students that I have to teach? How can anyone really expect me to effectively teach classes of 30+ students, on reading levels from 5th grade to post high school?

Ultimately, it boils down to the complex I have carried with me much of my life... that I can save the world, or at least fix America's public education system. My family, my friends, my circumstances, my logic- all tell me differently, yet it is still my overwhelming desire. At this point, however, it just feels like I am going to die trying.

Labels: education

posted by CP @ 10:12 AM 5 thoughts