"I had that moment of freedom, and now I'm going to pay for it dearly."

My friend and fellow teacher said that once. It's always stuck with me.

TMAO has explained many times what I stumble to express. And he's nailed it, yet again, with his post on reasons that didn't cause him to resign (I hate the word quit- it's the completely wrong word).

"This the endless travel over the dashed lines of self-improvement; the grind of figuring out how to do this job well, because my god, there’s too much at stake here to continue being so half-assed and poor at all this."

I'll explain my attachment to that quote with this quote: "Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing." Harriet Beryl Braiker

I don't take that as advice, but explanation. This is why I lose sleep, why I feel like a failure when my students fail (and sometimes even when they don't succeed as much as I'd like), why I spend way too much time chasing down the absolute best way to teach this skill and never feeling like I've found it. It's cognitive overload, it's pressure, it's perfectionism. And I feel like it's my job.

I can tell you that I am a good teacher. I can listen to other people tell me the same. But in my head, I can never stop. When I choose to (and it is a conscious choice to do not-as-good a job) I always pay for it later.

That said, I've been making that choice a lot more this year. I'm not sure what that means.

Also, you should know that I get why teachers make that choice to go home, or sometimes don't even really show up. I get why teachers don't care as much as I'd like them to. I have a hard time blaming them, because, hey, they got to go home.

"I'm not happy unless I'm putting the best product in front of kids, but I'm not necessarily happy in the constant construction and revision of that product." When I feel like this, I usually have the refrain, "What do you people want from me?!" in my head. TMAO sounds more like "Hey, you've had the best of me. You're welcome to it."

Damn, he's good.

Add it up

Third period- tough class with a group of tough kids. Some loudly complaining about the book we're reading (or that we're reading at all, I guess). I don't buy the excuse for not doing their work, that they "don't get it." The book's not hard. It's read aloud to them. I scaffold the reading every day. I've had them studying the vocab for a month before we began. Oh- and I know their reading levels (and really, the book's not that hard). And yet ... nothin' doin'.

So last night I created a guided, fill-in-the-blank summary for the chapters we read today. I told them it would stand in place of the assignment they bombed on Friday. They seemed okay with that. We start reading, and within five minutes they're gone on mental vacation. The whole little group.

I tell the rest of the class to keep going on their own, and I gather this little group around. I lean in, read aloud, stop after every paragraph, and walk them through their summaries inch by inch. It worked. They understood, they commented, they completed the assignment. Whew.

In my head, I'm thinking- Why do I have to do this? ...Why can't you do your work without someone sitting next to you? Out of all the many things I tell myself (and you shouldn't have to do this seems to be the thing I want to hear most) I think, in the end, the most useful is Well, it worked, and your students knew you cared. I can do this for a couple more days. The kids need more, I can give more. It adds up pretty well for the time being.