We hang snowflakes every year, a hundred of them at least, from the ceiling and some in the windows too. It is a tradition, something I fell into in Year 1. Ah, Year 1 of the teaching life. Snowflake Day 2008 emerged from a desperate attempt to fill time before Christmas Break. Now, it's a 'thing'.
I get nostalgic and sentimental about Snowflake Day because this is when all of my students, not just the loud ones, show me in class who they really are. I'm up on the ladder and there's Christmas music blaring and it's loud and crazy and wonderful. It's ordered chaos. I love that time, I'm waiting for it, because they live so tightly in the fall at school. At least some do. They're worried about getting to class at the right second and where they will sit for lunch (legitimate) and what I will think of them. It's nestled into the year at the point when we're happy to have snow, late in slate gray November, 4 weeks before Christmas.
Then, in the season we're in now, they come down, and I see again just how much real, authentic growth happens in these people every year. And in me. In the dead of winter, under the snowflakes.
When I stood in the middle of my classroom with a yardstick, pushing the tiles ever so lightly and watching freed snowflakes fall to the floor, my students gathered them up. They got all nostalgic together about time and how fast life can go. I participated in some of it, but some side of me was set apart while we worked, dreamy and silent and in reverie about a past self. One Miss Christians separate from current students that so fill up my world. One, let me tell you, who has learned a few things.
I consider Year 1 to be a terrible, glorious mess. I look back in it and every time I smile because it was fun. It was the thing I wanted to do in life so badly it ached all wrapped up into a first crack at what inevitably had to take the form of very public mistakes. Live and learn, learn, learn.
First, I was amazingly, passionately, nonsensically excited to be a teacher.
And I would have been horrified to say it then, but I can say it now. I was also all baby adult and geeky and proud, pretending to be casual, but living for things I'd imagined when I was little.
I dreamed of things, back in the 3rd grade, that actually came to be. And that felt wonderful. What's amazing about life in the adult world is how much the thing you love and care about can also wreck you, and how likely it is that your idealism can just get smashed to the ground.
A series of experiences had led me to see that I was too much of one thing and not enough of the other before I even graduated. I was a classic representative of my generation, of an idealistic 90s child turned hopeful Millennial. And suddenly I was in the work force. All previous provision and candor of my upbringing met the 'what ifs' that perpetuate so much of the 20s. So I knew I had to go after something and show I had stubbornness and grit. Teachers, even ones like me who show quiet power in speaking with a smile, without force, and staying kind and contained must be stubborn and have some grit.
They must, or they don't last.
In student teaching, the teacher I had to work with told me my first year in the classrom would be hell. I had pneumonia when he said that, and could have fainted. I'd like to stay dignified here, so I won't linger long but the gist of that time was that he talked to me like I was 2 inches small. There was a lot of swagger, and a lot of public attention to the fact that I was not a teacher who would probably coach. I learned what not to do, what not to say to a young new teacher I would someday meet and need to encourage.
I left with zero confidence in who I was in front of students, but some steely-eyed, stubborn resolve (hello, real me) to prove him wrong. He didn't know me at all, and while it might be terrible and raw sometimes, it would not be hell. I'd make sure of that.
Thankfully, I think that God placed very good men in my life as colleagues who could remind me, slowly, obviously, and subtly that not all men who teach are in a boys club. In fact, what do you know, some actively avoid it.
Was I totally polished and amazing right away? No. But I loved school. Loved it. I always
did. And that passion fueled all of the rest of it so I could sometimes just make it through. My first year of teaching was not hell. It was crazy good inspiring. One day last week, another colleague I work with said, 'Even on these hard days, isn't it nice to be in a place that we believe in so much? We get to work in a place that does inspire, at least on some ideal level today. That still works'. She was right.
Sometimes it's nice to be green and not know what the heck you're doing. I knew I was bad at some things as a teacher but it wasn't until Year 2 or 3 that I knew just how bad, or just what did go wrong. (Humbling. This was the year I was too hard on myself, and suspect and embarrassed of the thing I really was.)
By Year 4 I had settled into a new way of thinking....'Could this lesson actually be something I hold onto and feel good about? Really?' I didn't trust myself as much as I wanted to until Year 5. Not deep down. Some people could tell, people down the road in teaching who could see that I put some side of myself away. Life can be so vulnerable sometimes, and our work so personal. And now, in Year 6, I'm feeling really good. I miss a younger time for about .25 seconds. Then I so don't.
Year 6 is definitely no arrival at perfection, but instead balance. Instead, getting good with oneself, and knowing that the good teachers in this world don't feel that they've arrived. Those who do, let me assure you, are the ones who are annoying.
All this while taking snowflakes down from the ceiling with a yardstick? Yes. A lot, I know, but yes.
Now a breath, a break, a time to tour all the city's best coffee shops and turn to introspection. And yes, sometime some time to deal again with that ever present pile of papers. But only when I want to.
Beautiful distinction. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment