Matching Tracksuits

I’m sitting on the back porch with a bit of scotch and a cigar, reflecting on the day-the last day of school. It ended on a positive note, with a few very positive emails from parents and relatively peaceful final classes. It’s fairly amazing how all perceived animosity burns itself out in those final days and students and teachers alike seem more able to see the positive side of school — not to mention each other — than they have for weeks, or even months.

It being my first year teaching in the States, I did a lot of experimenting. I used in-class journals, Moodle, various writing workshops; I tried different forms of classroom management: some experiments were frustratingly unsuccessful, while others were more effective than I’d ever dreamed they’d be.

It was a year of relearning how to be a classroom teacher. It was a year of relearning all the wonderful things from adolescent psych about what thirteen-year-olds can, can’t, will, and won’t do. It was a year of fighting bureaucracy that I didn’t know existed in American schools. It was a year of relearning content-area knowledge, like how to spell “onomatopoeia.”

In trying to determine whether it was a successful year, I’m left wondering what “successful” means. How do I as a teacher measure success? My MAP test scores were higher in all classes in the spring than they were in the fall. Does that constitute success? NCLB says it does. I had a student who was brilliant and brilliantly troubled, and I never managed to make a chink in her armor so that we could string together more than two consecutive learning-filled days. Does that constitute failure? I taught some vocabulary well enough that some students were referring to other students’ disruptive behavior as “superfluous.” Does that constitute success?

This year I realized again what I’d learned years ago in Poland: the immediate, clear successes are few and far between. But there’s no way to know what seeds were planted. Teaching in a small village in Poland afforded me the opportunity to see what seeds I’d planted, because students would often come back years later and tell me what they were using their English for. Some got jobs abroad because of their English; some fell in love with foreigners because of English; several became English teachers. So I simply have to trust that I did accomplish good, that I did teach the 90+ young men and women in my charge for 180 days something, and maybe even something more than English.