love hate relationship

I often consider myself lucky that I don't hate my job. I actually must love my job, apparent by the sheer fact that I go every day. I hear from many of my other Teach for America friends with immensely challenging jobs before them that they wake up each morning thinking, "Maybe today I just won't go." Thus because of the absence of these thoughts in my mind, I feel deep down within me that I truly love my job. Sometimes I find myself gazing around at the faces of my students and simply smiling at them. They are so vivacious, they have so much character, and they are so overwhelmingly adorable in the most challenging kind of ways. And other days, like today, when their voices refuse to turn off and I feel the frustration of "I have no idea how to do this right" builds inside of me I just want to go home and pretend that I am in college again, with the LA sun shining dow upon me. But still, I go back the next day.

The best days are those when I can see how far we have come and how far we can go in terms of learning and in terms of growing to love each other. Tomorrow we will finish taking our first cycle of assessments, and from peering over their shoulders during testing I am so pleased with the results that I am seeing...pleased and surprised. A friend said to me that first year teachers go through four stages: 1) Unconsciously unskilled, 2) Consciously unskilled, 3) Consciously skilled, and 4) Unconsciously unskilled. I am confident that I am now at stage 2: I know that at times I completely suck. Though I have grown immensely in my job in the past 8 weeks, sometimes I still here a direction come out of my mouth and think to myself, "This is going to be a disaster." I have one student who knows little structure in the home. He is moving in and out of shelters so frequently that structure is simply unknown to him. It is so challenging to inspire him to be a part of the structure in the classroom, however I know that he doesn't mean to be disobedient...he merely doesn't know that directions are to be followed and structures are to be adhered by. And thus, I have to be both immensely tough and very supportive, which is so mentally exhausting that sometimes it is easier to just relax. That is when things go downhill.

Last week was a fantastic week. The struggles that we had with management in our classroom have improved so immensely that we are now finally able to have some fun. Last week during writing, we staged a crime in which a thief crept into our classroom and stole our class pumpkin. We had to play detectives and make lists of "character details" in order to catch the thief! The students were so engrossed in the crime that I hadn't thought ahead of time of the fact that they would not rest until the thief was caught! Therefore I wrote a note to the class that read, " You win LMU! But I'll be back at Thanksgiving...I love turkeys too!" Immediately, they began drafting plans about how to catch the thief at Thanksgiving...now the pressure is on.

It is moments like those that bring the joy, and it is the other kinds of moments that bring the purpose. Moments like the day I found out last week that one of my students, at only 7 years old, is obsessed with visions of death and shootings because of the shots she hears out of her window at night. Truly, I do not know what to say when she approaches me to tell me what she is thinking about. I know that I cannot have her draw them for me with the other students present, so I am at a loss. Still, it is times like these that ground me back into the mission on days like today when one scholar put an open milk container in her backpack and proceeded to drag it all around the classroom. My room is going to smell tomorrow.