Success

Might as well make it two in 24 hours, no? It's raining, it's pouring, soon the old man will be snoring?

I've been thinking a lot about success. What does it mean for me to succeed as a teacher? What does it mean for my students to succeed in the classroom? in MY classroom?

I've got nothing so far. I mean, what am I supposed to trying to accomplish with my 17 year old freshman? I'm not so idealistic to think that I will instill these individuals with either a profound love of reading or analytic thought. I would even be hard pressed to convince myself that I can really instill the habits and corresponding frame of mind that would orient these students toward life as life-long learners.

So what then am I trying to do? How can I best serve these students?

So far, the most common response has been that I'm trying to expose these individuals to something like middle-class values. I'm supposed to show them what it means to exist in a structured environment with varying degrees of democratic involvement.

This answer is unsatisfactory. For me, the disturbing cultural disconnect between me and my students undermines this idea of civic schooling. More often than not, I find that my students and I cannot actually resolve dialogue in any meaningful fashion because we don't really have a language in which we can understand each others' point of view. For many of my more challenging students, it seems that they can only understand authority that asserts itself through violence, be it verbal or physical. Where I might try to express the same message through a demerit or a writing assignment or even a warning, someone who speaks in and through the culture that my students seem to share would not yell per se, but attack that student verbally. I am neither able nor willing to engage in this violence. How then can I engage in a meaningful lesson on civic values if the very means by which I feel it necessary to express that message is unintelligible to those with whom I wish to speak? What if I am unable to speak a language that they can understand?

To return to my original line of questioning (of myself, of my job, of my goals, of my daily life), how can I best serve my students? I wish I knew how to teach them to read, but unfortunately I've known how to for as long as I can remember. I need to learn how to learn how to read (so, hopefully, my commander-in-chief will get around to the third copy of the two-month old requisition to go to Nashville to learn just that). If I could start to teach them how to really read, I'd feel like that was a start. But even that isn't particularly tangible. Would success be students who are trying to read? reading? wanting to read? In math, would it be students who are problem solving? wanting to problem solve? thinking about the possibility of problem solving?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm discourage because I feel like so much of an outsider that I don't know up from down in terms of goals and success. So much so, that I can't even evaluate my own daily actions let alone the work and attitude of my students. In addition to that, I feel like most of my communication with these students is lost in a translation neither I not most of my students can understand.