What Do I Want To Be When I Grow Up?

All I do anymore is tell stories about "my kids." Yes, I have become one of those lame ladies who don't have lives outside of their students, but at Institute that's all you really have to hold onto. You spend 20 hours a day cursingTFA because you only get 3 hours of sleep, but it's all so you can spend that 1 hour a day in the classroom.

I don't think my kids really know what to think about all of the 20-somethings that invaded their schools half-way through the summer (one of them invited me to "the club"), but to tell the truth, we don't really know what to think of them either. All night long, I go through my class roster in my head and think about all of them: what's worked for them, what hasn't, who I fought with, who I connected with, who I am getting through to and who is just pushing me away. It's scary that even though I am severely sleep deprived, I have to take sleeping pills to fall asleep because I can't stop thinking about what I need to be doing better. Something just isn't clicking. I am not a very good teacher. There must be something I can do better. After two weeks of teaching, mostly I have a running list of "what not to do" once I start again in my region. I have to dig very deep to try to find things to hold onto so I don't pack up my bag and call it quits.

Even though I don't think I am doing what I need to be doing, I can't stop caring. I guess that's why my suitcases are still empty. Today I watched 7 faces drop as they found out that the other 10 kids in our class would be passing onto the 8th grade and they would not. It almost broke my heart. I have to keep on teaching those 7 kids for the next two weeks to see if I can get them to pass, but the other 10 get to go home. I gave my e-mail address to one girl who swears adamantly that she wants to be a lawyer. She spells lawyer like "law," July like "glie," and career like "cerre," but I am going to get that girl to law school.

Game On

I am completely indoctrinated. I run around with catch phrases like "significant gains" and "relentless pursuit of results" in my head, and I dream about "closing the achievement gap." It is 9:45 pm here and I am just now getting a chance to eat dinner. There is such a sense of urgency that not a minute is wasted. I wake up between 4:45 and 5:00 am. I don't get to bed until about 1:00, but I may have to start staying up later to get some more work done. I don't drink a lot in the morning because we don't get bathroom breaks during the day. There just isn't time right now. We don't break for lunch, we work on through. To the outsider this may seem like unnecessary cruelty, but everyone here is completely devoted. We are devoted to the 50% of the 13 million impoverished children in our country who will not graduate from high school. I am devoted to the boys and girls in the eighth grade writing class I shadowed today, who literally did not know how to read and had no one care that they did not know how to read. I am devoted to the idea that (as my friend Andrew so eloquently put tonight), no matter where you start, you can finish someplace else.

I start teaching 7th grade writing on Monday. How the hell am I going to do that?

P.S. Later in the summer and throughout the school year, I want you all to remind me of this post when I start crying and thinking about quiting.