Failure Story

Dave Jones
6/14/06
Failure Story

The Ones Who Slipped Away

I am very much an old-school sort of teacher reluctant to embrace what I see as frilly new methodologies in teaching despite their obvious benefits, for better or for worse. My classroom can be fun, engaging, rewarding, and informal while remaining intellectually rigorous by relying on a focus on the basics of memorization as a springboard to deeper curiosities, connections, and meanings. The downside in this is that many students who are not as genuinely querulous on their own often see my class as little more than busy work with no real connections to the real world. A student of the classics in many ways must already be a student of the classics in order to fully appreciate its significance, and it is tremendously difficult for those resistant to this idea to be swayed. They end up leaving the classroom respectful of the incredibly academic and intellectual experience but unable to find any motivation to enter into that world. I constantly question myself: is it my fault for not inspiring them and helping build those bridges or is it their fault for being recalcitrant? Regardless, however, of who is to blame, I have made my peace with the greater part of this situation. I am who I am and they are who they are, and if a student cannot reach me halfway in this, I cannot become too upset about it, only struggle to improve for the next bunch. Nonetheless, a bright student who falls by the wayside because of this disconnect between my methods, the content, and its relevance causes me no limit of remorse, and where I went wrong with Jesse, Amber, and Brittany remains beyond me. (Their names of course have been altered for the present purpose.)
These three students are among the brightest in school. Perhaps not the brightest, but they do belong in that elite category of students who earn ‘A’s consistently on the report card, and at Murrah High School at least, this counts for something if not everything. At the beginning of the year, we all got along swimmingly and they helped make class a breeze. They were not overly curious as I could have hoped but nonetheless were motivated enough to at least get the job done and done well. Little did I know that that was warning sign, a warning sign of the student who does not necessarily care to learn but only to get the best grades in order to feel superior. I do not wish to psychoanalyze and villainize them too much, but gradually and imperceptibly this unwillingness to truly care evolved into an unwillingness to care at all, even for the lesser motive of grades. The question, asked innocently enough, “Can we have our tests back?” morphed into the petulant snap, “You never give us grades on time and you don’t know what you’re doing and I’m tired of this class.” Granted, I was never one to grade tests promptly, but I always finished them with reasonable punctuality, and among this and many other examples, the situation simply grew ugly.
It was difficult for me to maintain a positive attitude in the classroom, given that it took me many a month to even accustom myself to waking up at 6:30 am in the first place, let alone juggle all sorts of responsibilities teaching and otherwise. I fought the good fight with myself, though, and I noticed that my own energy and enthusiasm was often directly proportional to that of the class I was teaching at the particular moment, everything else such as number of hours slept and creativity of the lesson plan aside. Inevitably my ‘best’ classes would augment a good mood or cheer up a bad mood so that it took less effort to produce an excellent, high-octane lesson, whereas my ‘worse’ classes would take small but incessant bites of my soul regardless of my mood du jour and effort. With one of my classes, I may as well have been a cat trapped in a corner, or perhaps more fittingly, a deer stuck in the headlights, having attempted the whole gamut of positive rewards and negative consequences and anything else I could dream up to motivate them, receiving blank stares or malicious flippancy until giving up seemed to me the only option. While a more experienced and talented teacher probably could have saved the situation, my administration and colleagues sympathized and empathized with my lost cause after hearing some of the names in my class who when combined were pure hell. That was enough to convince me that it was not worth the stress, and that I am certainly not the romanticized super-teacher I still hope to become.
But that class was not nearly so hard to deal with as the one Amber, Jesse, and Brittany attended. After my year-long battle with complete apathy, I could not have realized that this was not rock bottom until the moment came when bright students who seemingly were on my side betrayed me and grew actively opposed to my efforts. What was once one of my favorite classes to enter into everyday became by far the worst. With the first period class, at least I could eventually suppress my guilt with a sense of moral righteousness, but with this third period class I felt simply Benedict Arnolded. You may not have realized that this name can be used as a verb, but believe me, it is the only way to explicate the regret and helplessness that swelled within me. Amber probably does not recall telling me that I was probably her favorite teacher at the beginning of the year, but I do. What she probably does remember, however, is refusing to take my final exam for no discernable reason, my utterly childish response, and the resulting zero on her report card that was placed adjacent to her string of 97s and 98s. While it was not entirely my fault, I am fully willing to admit that I devolved to her level of immaturity until our class become nothing more than a contest of wills and peevish remarks while the other students more or less cooperated with the lesson mainly due to their incredulity. My introspection has led me to a conclusion that is perhaps controversial, but I cannot help but trust my gut instinct on this one: it is much more painful and lamentable that I was betrayed by these few bright students by my own personal ineffectiveness and immaturity rather than that I failed to inspire so many more students to hop on the bandwagon in the first place.