To throw pebbles into the ocean

This Monday was my first day back at school after spring break. I tried very hard to come in with a positive attitude, but the day did nothing but beat me up. I didn't have a single second to myself the entire day between covering another teacher's class and meeting with former students who came back to visit and tell me about college. I was of course very excited to see my graduates, but their news was hard for me to hear.

Of my senior class last year, I have heard from three kids, and all three of them have failed multiple college courses in their first two semesters. This was truly devastating to me not only because it's hard to see my kids disappointed, but because those were three of my best students in the years I taught them. They are strong thinkers, readers, and writers. Some took my AP Language class, and some demonstrated college reading levels by the beginning of their 12th grade year. If they were such strong students in high school, why couldn't they do well in college? I instantly felt it had to be my fault. If only I had prepared them better, had higher expectations, had more conversations with them about how different college would be (despite the fact that I haven't been in college in 10 years and I have no idea how much it has or hasn't changed in that time). I went home at the end of the day with my head down, dragging my feet, feeling like I'm doing nothing but setting kids up for failure. Many days my job feels like throwing pebbles into the ocean. Yesterday I thought, I'm doing such a bad job, I'm not even throwing the pebbles, am I?

When each student described to me what happened that led to their steep drops in GPA, it sounded to me like all of those failures have been due to poor attendance rather than lack of understanding of the content. As I write this, I realize why it's not quite fair of me to blame myself. Each student had excellent attendance in high school, and there was nothing I could have done to predict that this would be hard for them afterwards. Even if content were the issue, I can only challenge my classes so much when I have such a wide array of abilities in my classroom. But that often feels like just an excuse, and I still have the lingering feeling like I'm not doing nearly enough, which is exacerbated by the fact that I am absolutely doing a lot less this year than usual. Since my son was born in the fall, I don't have the time I used to have to be at school an hour early and stay an hour (or hours) late, making lessons during unpaid hours because I gave all my prep (and lunch) time to working with individual kids. And honestly, though many kids have been so happy for me, there are others who seem very bothered by my shifting priorities.

I have one class in particular though that has been incredibly supportive. On Tuesday they had a phenomenal discussion on the topic of social comparison as part of our Death of a Salesman unit in which they debated the idea of whether it is always negative to compare yourself to other people on social media and whether or not people can easily resist negative comparison and instead use others as motivation to better their lives. After they debated amongst each other for about 15 minutes, I talked to them about negativity bias and concepts from Buddhism about suffering coming from wanting things, not from not having things. They were really interested in these ideas, and I felt called to tell them how grateful I felt for their engagement, how I felt really down the day before but they made me feel like I'm doing something meaningful and helpful again. As soon as I said I had had a bad day, several of them chimed in with a severe, "Who did it?" I reassured them that no one "did" anything to me, I was just disappointed. They urged me further to tell them why, so leaving out identifying information of course, I shared with them how I felt responsible for my former students failing in college. They were surprised I could possibly feel this way and vehemently disagreed. I shrugged and said, "What can I say, guys? I'm a Leo—we think everything is our fault!"

I also think the decline in success at college has a lot to do with phones and social media, as I talk about all the time. (The decline in EVERYTHING good has to do with that. Comment with an example to prove me wrong if you can.) But there's an interesting paradox here. If I spend all my time blaming things out of my control, I feel too helpless to carry on. And if I spend all my time blaming myself, I feel equally defeated. And because I'm naturally a black-and-white thinker, it's hard to peacefully accept that it's both—I can make some difference, but it's ultimately out of my control what anyone else does. I often feel like every internal battle that teachers are facing are this battle at its core. If we can be influential, we can always be more influential, and at what point is it okay to let go of responsibility? How do we know when we’ve reached the line of all we can reasonably do?

I’ll leave you with that question, because I don’t have the answer. At least, not yet.