FAILURE STORY

Failure: I’ve experienced a lot of it. From being inconsistent with rules and procedures, to losing final exams, to sleeping through my alarm clock on the first day of school – I’ve definitely self-titled myself “Miserable Failure” many times throughout my first year of teaching. What’s funny (sort of), is that I expected, and kind of enjoy being a failure – it seems to be the appropriate strife of a public school teacher. If I didn’t feel that I was a failure most days, I think I would be doing something wrong. There are so many policies, politics, and people working against teachers, that, many times, it is impossible not to fail. However, there is a big difference in the failure that I can control, and the failure that is out of my hands. Most days, I don’t bother to try and separate the two. Looking back, though, its much easier for me to distinguish what was my fault, and what was the fault of other circumstances. Being able to recognize this distinction makes teaching and setting goals much easier. After days of sulking over some silly rule that the district administration set in place, or some crazy pacing-guide which changes every hour, or surprise assemblies that interrupt my highly-prepped-for pop-quiz, I realized that being frustrated and complaining was hindering more than helping the situation. Not that I don’t condone the occasional vent-session – but there’s a time and a place for this. I learned that within school walls, or even after school at home, sometimes, was not the appropriate venue.

The failure that I would like to highlight from my past year as a teacher, and a failure that I still am trying to deal with to this very day, is my ability to organize and prioritize. This may seem to be an inconsequential, silly, common failure – but, it actually affected me and my students greatly, and often, quite negatively. By failure to organize, I am referring to me losing papers, forgetting to mark absences, losing tools (staple machine, hole punch), letting papers to be graded pile up in stacks on my floor, never creating a “make-up work” policy, etc. I generally tend to consider myself a fairly neat and systematized individual; however, by the end of every 9 weeks, my entire house was a mess. One day it got so bad that my room mate had to point out the vacuum to me, and then point out the hundreds of little paper dots on our dining room floor from when I had accidentally dropped and busted-open my hole punch a month before. It was horrible.

The mess of my house and classroom just added to the mess in my head. I was so tired and stressed after school, and when I went home I had nothing to greet me except paper dots, assignments to be graded, and lesson plans to be made. This is when I also lost (if ever I had) my ability to prioritize. Coming home to what seemed to look like another sort of classroom, I often just zoned out – I would eat, set a time to start work, lose track of time, and eventually get up to begin work around 10:30-ish. Of course, by this time I was exhausted, and any intention to do work that I began with would be short-lived. Of course, my work ethic changed from day-to-day, but generally I never completed as much as I would set out to do. I don’t believe that I set any expectations that were too high; I just prioritized poorly and did not allow for enough time to meet the reasonable expectations that I had set. As a result a fell further and further behind in work, slept less and less trying to finish work, and became grumpier and grumpier at school the more tired I grew.

If the results of lack of the ability to organize and prioritize do not already strike the reader as serious, consider this: a grumpy, tight edged, confused teacher with poor hygiene from sleeping until the last possible minute. HORRIBLE.

I am still struggling to overcome this failure to prioritize my work. I have already begun to prioritize my time, creating a schedule, making a bed-time (yes, a bed time) and planning to stay after school with work, as opposed to taking it home with me at night – a luxury that my new school in Jackson is providing me with. When I was an undergrad, I tended to pull all-nighters and feel overloaded with work; but, in college, it was always work that I enjoyed. Learning how to make my work something more enjoyable for me is going to be the hardest part of learning to organize and prioritize. This is not to say that everything is boring, but so much of what I do is adult busy-work. Perhaps if I learn to find more importance in this work, or to simply remember the great importance of the other work that I do, my ability to schedule and complete tasks will greatly improve, and along with this, my teaching experience and - most importantly – the education of my students will improve as well.