On Being Miss Thomas

When I consider my girlhood aspirations, which included being a ballerina/singer and owning a pony, becoming a teacher was not among them. Indeed, I spent 5 years of my life ensuring everyone that while I majored in English, I had no intention of teaching. It is laughable how mistaken I have proved myself to be.

Now that I find myself in the throes of lesson planning, classroom management, and grading, I have developed a deep appreciation and respect for my teachers from elementary school to college. It is a hard job. It's hard to stand in front of a classroom of--count them--24 6th-graders and command their attention. It's hard to force a discussion on Navajo Origin Myths with 4 11th-graders. It's hard to know what to do when the Nigerian 7th-graders turn against the American and British 7th-graders.

The toughest part of my job isn't actually interacting with my students. It's grading them. I knew coming into this that some of my students would have a better command of English than others. I just didn't expect there to be such a disparity between the ones that do and the ones that don't. In one class, I have a Nigerian child who can't spell "doesn't," another who began learning English in 2008, and another who daydreams in class because he can't follow along in the textbook when we read aloud.

At ICS, we practice differentiation, which basically means that we grade subjectively based on a child's English proficiency. As the English Literature teacher, I feel this pressure most profoundly. Differentiation doesn't mean playing favorites; it means grading a student based on what they know, and depending on the class, up to half of the students are differentiated in my gradebook. Out of 59 students in my 5 classes, up to 30 of them are graded on an individual basis. That's a lot of extra work, but mostly, just extra thought.

I so badly want to see my students succeed. I want to be Miss Thompson from that story "3 Letters from Teddy" in Chicken Soup for the Soul. I want to believe in my students until they believe in themselves. I want to champion in them a love of literature.

But the grades are in on the first round of tests, and it's not looking good. I won't curve and I won't give pluses or minuses. My grading is straightforward, but apparently my test questions are not. After reviewing a particular question on the 10th grade test, I decided to throw it out. Doing so, I learned afterwards, made the difference between a D and C for one of my students. I cannot express the delirious relief I felt when I changed his grade.

I know I'm a new teacher, but in the reading and research I've done, I've come to see that the responsibility for learning rests 100% on me as a teacher (and 100% on them as students, but that's another topic for another time). Based on that principle, a test is a reflection of me, the teacher, and my ability to make my students learn, so I feel the pinch and pain of every D.

I want to make sure my students see that literature can be fun. I'm contemplating a partial overhaul of some parts of my curriculum to allow for a week of supervised fun reading culminating in a book report. I want my kids to love reading as much as I did when I was a kid. Now that I'm teaching, I realize just how much I really do love literature. After 17 years of education and forced reading and college classes and the English major, I'd forgotten. Literature is my passion. I can't imagine teaching anything else.