self-reflection blog

Two years have passed and I still wake up with the same shocking realization:  I am in Mississippi.  Two years later, and I have still not fully contextualized this reality.  I know the objective realities.  I am a member of the Mississippi Teacher Corps; an employee of the Jackson Public School District; a coach and a mentor; a steward of young people and cog in a bureaucratic system; a teacher (for better or for worse).

I have found myself wondering in what specific ways this job, this program, and this experience have changed me.  As a professional, I have changed in two major aspects.  One is my understanding of organization.  As a professional, especially a professional with limited down time, organization 2is key.  The failure to have a system that cuts down on grading, reading lesson planning, and just general work related things will kill you.  I remember being swamped with mounds of paper work as a first-year, and feeling like there was an anchor I had to drag everywhere.  Having a systemic way to attack not only your job, but even your down time (working out, eating right, hanging out with friends) is what makes our breaks your experience in this profession.  Where in college you could get away with a more free-form approach, I have found, at least with teaching in Mississippi, that organization is the first thing you need to master in order be successful.

    The other thing that I have found myself changing is my relationship to power.  I have always had an ambivalent relationship to Skinnerian models of how people in positions of power should respond the people who work under them.  The sit down, shut up model of teaching sounded immensely disheartening, if downright oppressive during my first summer school experience in Oxford.  Reality has away of changing ideology.  It was probably at some point during my first semester of teaching when, in one of my larger classes, I had a girl who shut down because she was embarrassed about being made fun of because she was not a great reader and was afraid of being made fun of.  If, as a teacher, I cannot use my authority to create an ecumenical environment where individuals from different class statuses,  learning abilities, religious beliefs and sexual orientations cannot work together and respect each other, than I cannot honestly say that I have served them well.

    A lot of my growth has come from the conversations with my classmates in the Teacher Corps program.  Trading stories, discussing what we have done effectively and ineffectively, determining that one person’s approach may not synch with mine has made me more cognizant of who I am as a teacher; exposing what my own weaknesses and strengths may entail.  Additionally, coaching and working with CRCL, seeing my students outside of a classroom context, have made me infinitely more empathetic to the experiences of my students.  Having a discussion with a student outside of the classroom space, hearing their dreams and fears, gives you a greater patience with the inherently precarious path that high school students face with carving out their still burgeoning adult identities.  At times, they can be obnoxious, apathetic, and even downright disrespectful, but that does not necessarily mean that you can’t gleam something valuable from their perspective.

    This profession will force you to change in some valuable ways--growth in the truest sense of the word.  In my experience, that growth has been accompanied by a sense of internal strength that I believe will serve me well as I continue on from this place.

In many ways I have grown immensely from the lessons I have taught, and learned in my Mississippi experience.  I am not quite sure when, or where, it will strike me that this period in my life has permanently changed me;  that it is now and will always from this point be a part of me.  I’ll take pride in the experience, the work that I have done here.  It is not so much a sense of closure or catharsis that I feel now that it is over (although I am experiencing those feelings as well).  Rather, its a deep, overwhelming pensiveness.  The same “ I am a teacher in Mississippi” question remains unresolved, a two year series of tangled experience.  It will be a life long struggle to define and redefine it.  But, perhaps that is the true beauty of it.