I Failed...I Think

I will start this blog post with a caveat and an excuse- It's going to be vague. Or at least the details of the inciting incident will be vague, and I'm doing that on purpose. Sometimes in education the stories we are a part of are not ours to share. This is not one of those. The details of this particular story will be kept vague because I'm not looking to drag the main character out here on the internet. I'll also admit that subtle is not something that I'm known for, so my attempts to make a point while keeping the details of why that point is on my mind might be clumsy.

This year I started a journey that I've taken a few times in the course of my career. It's a very important journey to me, so much so that I've spent month and months and tens of thousands of words talking about it and sharing my outlook on it. I think it's the best kind of professional development a teacher can undertake because it forces you to reflect openly and honestly on a constant basis. I took on a student teacher.

I've had many student teachers, and they've ranged from absolutely wonderful to simply very good. To this point I've worked with three university programs. I go into mentor teaching with a positive outlook and a servant mentality, ready to give of myself and my time because growing new teachers is a vital part of a veteran teacher's job in my opinion.

I am, if I may say so myself, good at being a mentor teacher. This is not my ego talking (though you'll have to trust me on that). My student teachers leave my classroom ready for their own, and many of them have stepped from my classroom straight into their own without having to go through the long process of subbing and applying and applying and applying like many, including myself, had to do at the start of our careers. Part of my identity as a teacher is closely tied to being a good mentor teacher. Yes, I'm a good classroom teacher. My kids love coming to school, they learn a lot and in creative ways. But I'm also good at translating that for another adult in the room who is watching and learning how to do it.

Teaching is a hard job. Student teaching is an exceptionally hard job, because on top of the expectations of the student's placement there are the expectations of being a college student. It's a lot. But, in my mind, our students should always take priority. Above anything else, a student teacher is responsible for the learning of the however many kids that are in that room with us. So while I'm exceedingly flexible because I understand the difficulty of the learning process, I also feel very strongly about this. I don't think I understood exactly how strongly I feel about the job until this year. I've never been pushed like this before. I've never had to grapple with the emotions that I felt this year in connection to my student teacher, so I spent a lot of time reflecting on them. I needed to understand why I was getting so worked up when I never have before. Now, I run hot a lot of the time, especially when it comes to this job. I'm always Up. But there's a difference between being passionate (buzzword bonus points) and being angry. I was angry. A lot.

Without going into detail, so you, my dear reader, are going to have to decide how much you trust me and how unreliable of a narrator you think I might be, a lot happened in my classroom and outside of my classroom since the start of the year that made me feel that I was not respected and my students were not respected. There was no isolated incident, there was only a near constant piling on of issues, some big, some small, but most things that on their own could have be handled.

Handling things, though, is a two-way street. While I'm sure that the other person's story would be different, it always is, my issues were never dealt with or treated with respect. I don't think they were actually heard. There is a level of maturity required in education that was not present, and this lead to a regular series of issues that snowballed at the end into a few Very Big Poor Choices that should never have happened. Feedback was never taken on-board in a meaningful way. Occasionally, and after the fact, the words were said that made it sound like feedback was heard, but actions never reflected this.

You see, part of being a mentor teacher is you tell me something, I give you feedback, you choose to act on it or not. I expect that you act on it because I'm rarely going to say something that won't work. I am, as I said, good at this. Been doing it for a while. Doesn't mean I know everything, I'm not perfect, but I am good. What a student teacher shouldn't do is turn that feedback back on their mentor teacher.

Here, I will be specific about one incident because I do want you, reader, to understand what I mean. Right at the end I gave a piece of feedback that went like this. "You are still too sarcastic with the kids. It doesn't work. You sound like a dick sometimes." The context for this is it's a conversation that had taken place previously and it was during a conversation initiated by the student teacher asking the very good question of how to deal with challenging students, one in particular. This is a good question, or would be if the person asking it wanted to hear an answer. So I said, "You're still too sarcastic with the kids." The immediate response, and I mean immediate, there was no moment of reflection, no thought, the immediate response was, "Well so are you."

...

I want to be clear- I'm not too big to take feedback from anyone. I've got a sign on my door asking for feedback. However, this wasn't feedback. This was an excuse. It was a retort jumping up to defend a fragile ego. It also wasn't the time to do that because a lot of other things had happened surrounding this moment to make that an even worse choice that it might sound like to you.

"Well so are you."

Yes, I am. Because I know my kids and I don't use it as a weapon. Because I've been doing this long enough that I know the difference between gentle pushing with certain kids and using it for control. And maybe that's how I should have responded. But I didn't because I was knocked on my butt by the gall it must have taken to respond like that. "You asked me for feedback, I gave it, and we're not talking about me. We're talking about you. The student teacher." He went on, digging deeper, trying to say I modeled the behavior and he learned it from me.

This was one of many things. It wouldn't be the first time or the last time I'd be put into the Bad Guy position that day. That day, by the way, was his last day.

I've never dismissed a student teacher before. This one had been told not to come in at least once previously and warned that is something didn't happened they wouldn't come in another time. This was the last straw. And then later that day he added three more tons of straw on top of it. That recess was a bad scene.

I'm not here to vent about him though. I needed to use at least one specific example even though I said I'd try to stay vague. I'm here to talk about how I felt leading up to that.

I felt like I failed. Like the problem was on me. I knew the problems were coming from him, but I thought there was things I wasn't doing. But I also can't do the job for a student teacher. That's not the job of a mentor teacher. I prepare, but they've got to be prepared. And up till now, they have been. This one never was. Not even when given the smallest direction. It was this moment, "Well so are you" when I fully internalized that there was nothing I could have done this year to prepare the person for teaching. Their choices were beyond me.

I understand ego protecting ego. I get that. I get being defensive. I get making excuses. I get being insecure and compensating in bad ways. But I do not get letting that happen with my kids. My responsibility to them outweighs everything else. You can't make someone mature.

I think I might have failed at being a mentor teacher. And that hurts. But I'm pretty sure I never had a chance.

Or maybe I succeeded as a mentor teacher because there are people who are not ready to be teachers, or should never be, and the unpleasant job of a mentor teacher, the part of the job I've never once had to think about before now, is preventing those people from entering their own classroom. My job is not to protect an ego.

If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- He’s the Weird Teacher, THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome), and A Classroom Of One. I’ve also written one novel- The Unforgiving Road. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets @TheWeirdTeacher.