Relentless Disappointment

Do you ever have those moments when someone says a particular word or phrase and you get stuck? It's somehow beyond simply resonating. It's paralyzing.
You can't continue to listen and process because they've pinned you in a memory or feeling that you can't escape.
Why is that? Am I looking for connection? Am I constantly processing a situation or problem and waiting to hear the right words to name it? To solve it? To connect it?

I suppose if I am truly being reflective, I understand why it's taken me so long to do this "final" blog post to sum up what this cadre experience has been for me. I like to put pretty bows on things and wrap them up into an easy to understand package, but I'm endlessly messy. I want things to be so perfect, but I'm really a crunched box full of unrelated items I have no idea how to classify and probably have no business lumping together. I wait so long to reflect on a single experience because I seek connections between them all, seeking feverishly for meaning, and end up forgetting most of the details and getting lost altogether. I freeze.

"Relentless Disappointment," he said. I couldn't focus for the rest of the meeting.

That's this job. 'Like waves crashing down on you without a care for how many times you already been struck, or how hard, or whether you'll survive the next one.'

Man, that's my whole life. Not just teaching.
It's a battle every day. To keep going, to stay positive.

And just when you feel like you might have a handle on it, another wave crashes down.
How am I supposed to get through that?

This cadre has been a roller coaster of emotions, where the ideas are so exciting you can't wait to get back into the classroom. You plan and toil and implement and that one kid in the front row asks for the 400th time, "What are we supposed to do?" It might not bother you the first 399 times, but that 400th one comes at just the wrong time. When you really needed a win.

Relentless disappointment.

Then the next period, you start over, tweaking a couple things here and there to do it better the next time. Because it must be me, right? I must not have done a good job explaining directions, but I know I can do it better if I get another chance. I guess that's why I can keep going.

Teaching isn't about getting comfortable. Our Strategic Plan's Theory of Action includes the phrase, "If we are relentless in our pursuit of..." What follows those ellipses will be ever changing - increased student engagement, higher graduation rates, positive student relationships, more diverse pathways, increased student choice, technological understanding...
There is always something we can do better - we must be relentless in our pursuit of overcoming relentless disappointment.

Professional development, particularly this cadre's format, gave me an opportunity to pursue whatever path I need to focus on to overcome the current disappointment. It was through the lens of technology - but technology is the tool that has helped me either research solutions to the current problem I'm experiencing or provided a tool to further students understanding or, at the very least, pushed me out of a comfort zone and kept me from getting too comfortable.

I'm convinced that if I ever get comfortable in this job, that's when the relentless disappointment wins.
And I have to remember to note not only the current disappointment, but the recurring small victories.
So I will leave you with a list of those wins I can remember (and I promise to do a better job of reflecting more often).
Fair warning - they probably have little to do with technology integration:
1. The Dream Team (you know who you are)
2. Coach (you know who you are)
3. Implementing Storylines into the Science Curriculum
4. Taking risks with my curriculum - changing it mid-year, and trusting my students to keep up (they did!)
5. Not giving up the belief that students need exposure to more than the content area in the course description - they need skills, and to be reminded that being a good human is just as important (and maybe more so) than getting an A.
5b. Understanding that technology is a tool to be used, not the focus of education.
6. Those two kids who come to my class during Core to tell me how much they hate school (Because they could have just left, or not shown up at all)
7. I got that kid to wear a lab coat, even though he didn't want to.
8. I made that kid smile EVERY day - and that was as much success as he could handle.
9. She will NEVER forget how to calculate a percentage.
10. She gave me the razor blade.
11. He demonstrated his understanding of immunology with a better analogy than the one I gave him.
12. That same kid may have found his passion for a future career in research in epigenetics because I happened to mention that news story I heard.
13. My plans to institute self-directed learning through the use of website modules (Thank you, Tyler Rablin!)
13b. Understanding when time is the constant, learning is the variable. (Thank you again, Tyler Rablin!)
14. I think that kid is going to graduate.
15. She believed she could, so she did. I was a part of helping her know she could.
16. So did he.

I will be relentless in my pursuit to overcome relentless disappointment and to encourage others to do the same.