Worth It

I teach Middle School English. This is a joy and a curse.

Last weekend, I posted lesson plans through the last day of this school year. It is finished. This is joy.

But as I scan these plans, I realize I have six different set of essays or drafts of essays coming in during the next two weeks that I will need to read and grade . . . plus about thirty written responses to independent reading assignments . . . plus three classes worth of semester tests which include essay questions analyzing a literary passage.

And this drives me to curse.

Why do I do this? Why?

Why do I schedule so much work to come in at one time, at the end of the semester when I have a hard deadline to get it all graded? What am I thinking? Why don’t I spread it out more?

Well, Gwen, you can’t spread it out much more because these are all summative assessments, basically. They are demonstrating what the students have learned as the semester closes, so you have to wait until the close of the semester. The problem is that you teach English which has forty-seven different kinds of skills and knowledge that need to be assessed.

Okay, Gwen, so why do I teach English?? Why don’t I teach math? Math is easy to grade. Answers are right or wrong. They come in number format – no pages and pages of words. Why don’t I teach math?

Gwen . . . come on . . . you as a math teacher?!??! For the love of EVERYTHING . . .

Sigh. Fair enough.

When I was a senior in high school, there came a point when I realized I was going to college in a few months, and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and therefore no idea what to major in. And I started to panic a bit. Looking back now, panic was quite silly on my part – I was only seventeen. But I decided that these questions needed to be settled once and for all and quite soon.

So, I put on my walking shoes and snuck through the row of trees at the back of our yard that separated our property from the cemetery behind it. Yes, I lived next door to a cemetery. Less creepy than you would think. It was a great place to be alone and contemplate enormous, substantial things like this – so I started walking, praying, thinking. I wish I had more memory of how everything evolved in my mind that afternoon. All I can tell you is, I snuck back into my backyard an hour later with not just a decision, but a calling: the most important thing I could possibly do with my life would be to teach, and so that was what I was going to do.

Fortunately, I have discovered over the years that I’m actually pretty good at this job and that the work genuinely fulfills me. Which confirms the idea that this was a calling on my life and not just a brain fart in the graveyard. 

I don’t just teach; I am a Teacher.

Nevertheless, when a couple hundred pages full of words requiring my attention and evaluation are dumped in my lap, the sense of fulfillment wanes. As much fun as I have seeing the great words Suzy found to express her thoughts in her literary analysis essay . . . as much joy as I feel reading the insights Joey got from the novel he read . . . as much satisfaction as I get from seeing that Billy FINALLY figured out how to use apostrophes correctly . . . I do reach a saturation point where I just can’t look at the words anymore. There are too many. I’m too tired. It’s too hard.

My Crestmont colleague found a poster in a cabinet that she put on the bulletin board of our teacher workroom back in August, declaring “I think we’re going to need to see this every day this year.”

It reads, “I’m not telling you that it’s going to be easy. I am telling you that it is going to be worth it.”

She’s right. I needed to see that every day. This year has certainly not been easy, but yes, when the ocean of words that I’m swimming in gives evidence that my kids have learned . . . it is SO worth it.