I have been teaching for eight years. As I enter my ninth year, I have come to a realization that I am NOT a bad teacher. Nor am I one of the greatest teachers. I do good work. I make good connections with kids. I am able to teach them some math along the way. But I can't help feeling that I am missing something.
After some Twitter lurking and some thought this week, I think I understand a little bit about why I feel that way.
For the first seven years of my career, I had an excellent mentor on campus. We worked well together. She was very supportive and we became good friends. She also did most of the work. I helped a little here and there, but I just rode her coat tails on pretty much everything. If she did something, then I did it. She did all the research and work. All I did was try to do what she told me about with varying degrees of success. It was not a very fair relationship. Now I did create some things on my own, but they were few and far between and I ALWAYS ran it past her before I tried it.
Enter year eight...
My friend and mentor moved on to be the Secondary Math Coach for our district. She wasn't two doors away anymore and I had to start flying on my own. I have to say that there was more crashing than flying in the creative department for me. I had to do it on my own, and I realized just how much I had depended on her. I had done MYSELF a disservice by being a follower and not trying to be a leader. Year eight was a rough year with a lot of ups and downs. I count it as my least successful year in terms of student understanding and achievement in my Algebra 2 classes. (However, I did find a lot of success in my Math Analysis classes, so it wasn't a terrible year overall.)
This weekend on Twitter, I found this quote from Ira Glass...
"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple of years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good. It has potential. But it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you finish a story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions."
It really struck a chord with me. As a result of being a follower, I am still in the beginning stages of defining MY teaching. By just following along and not stretching my creativity, I robbed myself of that volume of work that I should have done that would help me close the gap of where my teaching is and where I want it to be.
So, now I go forward into year nine with a little more understanding of myself. I am not sure where to start, but I know that I need to get working so I can start closing that gap somehow.
I will forever be grateful for my friend and mentor. She has been and will always be an inspiration. I will probably still ask her opinion on stuff. But I need to START doing it myself or it will never get done.
See you later all you AWESOME people...
