School stuff...

Today I went into school today. To really work on classroom stuff-cleaning, organizing books, putting up bulletin boards. There is that feeling of progress, of newness, of starting again that is refreshing. A new batch of kids. A new technique or two to try. A new optimism that only happens at this point in the year.

I suppose that is what keeps me coming back- always a new start to impact student's lives. I know I can't get to everyone, but if I can make a lasting difference in just a few lives, I feel satisfied at the end of the year. This past year, I had one student in particular who really had some struggles and even lost her father in the last week of school. At the end of the year, she wrote me some really sweet things that meant a lot. That is the encouraging part of teaching.

The difficult part, as any seasoned teacher knows, is that there is no perfect recipe for success. Each student brings burdens, cares, or distractions with them to school, and it is my job to try teach in spite of these. A blogger didn't quite understand this in his comments about standardized testing. He seemed to think that standardized testing was an end-all for evaluating  teacher performance. Of course it isn't- otherwise it would have solved education's woes a long time ago. Yet I still think that it is an important part and don't mind being evaluated on the improvement of my student's test scores from their previous year. I don't think that teacher should be evaluated on a exact percentage of students that arrive on a certain level, but instead on improvement from the previous year.

In about three more weeks I see this year's set of about 100 thirteen and fourteen- year olds.

Bring it on! :)