Day -18: Endings vs. Beginnings

Does it make me a bad teacher that I like the beginning of the school year so much better than the end?

I feel like by the end of the year, I'm supposed to have built one big, happy family. I'm supposed to be able to sit back and bask in the glow of all the learning we've done. But that's not how it is for me.

The beginning is all possibility. In September, I'm meeting this group of 30-odd students, getting to know them and falling in love with their quirks and smiles and questions and aspirations. They've just spent a couple of months sitting around watching too much TV (in some cases, anyway), away from their friends, and they have gotten bored, bored, bored. They are so eager at the beginning of the year, hanging on my every word, so excited to see what the mysterious world of fourth grade will be like, trying so hard to put their best foot forward. When I look at their work in the fall, I see what I need to help them with, and I dream big of all the progress they will make, all the learning we will do together. Kids really do ask me for homework and get sad on Friday because there isn't school the next day.

But now, they're sick of each other, sick of me, sick of our routines, sick of tests. Their hopes that suddenly they would master the multiplication facts they didn't learn in third grade haven't been realized either. It's so easy to focus on the gaps between where I want students to be and where they are now. At the beginning of the year, those gaps weren't my fault; I was just entrusted with closing them. But now I see, in some cases, how big the gaps remain, and it can't help but depress me.

Not that students haven't made progress. Of course they have. Sometimes I look at our whiteboard full of math problems we do each day and marvel at the fact that at the beginning of the year, they didn't know how to do any of those problems - find equivalent fractions, write decimals, calculate area and perimeter, do long division. But other times I focus on the students who still can't do some of those problems. Like Arturo, who still, still does not reliably use capital letters at the beginning of his sentences! He knows, when reminded, what to do. He punctuates sentences appropriately. He just does not start sentences with capital letters. I have handed back countless papers of his, forcing him to add capitals in appropriate places before I would grade his work. To what avail? Almost none. He will dutifully add capitals without any prompting from me about where they needed to go, but will he use capital letters appropriately on his own for his next assignment? Usually no. He is a smart kid. He remembers lots of other, much more obscure things. What's his block about capitals? I wish I knew. I think his fifth grade teacher is going to kill me.

Thankfully, the very-end-of-the-year nostalgia will set in, for both me and my students, pretty soon, and then we will focus on all the good parts of our year together. At the moment, though, I feel disintegration rather than creation.