The Work

Friday at 5:00 P.M. officially and technically ended my first quarter as a CPS teacher at a fantastic high school on the west side. My first quarter there, as a teacher, has been the most challenging nine weeks of my 10+ years as an educator.

To be fair, my commute is way simpler, and way easier. But the classes are larger. A higher percentage of my students are in deep poverty, and affected by trauma. For the first time in my career I have a large room of freshmen - the "kindergarten of adulthood" - and they are a whole different type of animal . . . MORE of my prep taken is taken by my administrators. The hoops I have to jump through with regards to submitting unit plans and lesson plans, are higher. The administrative directives to routinely call parents, and log it, are more onerous, and more formalized. My (primary) grade level is planning a giant service learning project TOGETHER, one in which the whole sophomore class will participate. The planning for that unit has been painstaking.

Don't get me wrong . . . my last district in NW Indiana was and remains a great one, but in many ways I feel like I have "moved up to the big leagues." Coming to CPS has forced me to be a better teacher. It has also been an insane amount of work, and stress.

Now throw in the strike, and the financial worry, and standing around outside in the cold for four-seven hours most days, not knowing when things would "go back to normal."

Last week the word came down from CPS top brass that, despite our two weeks + a day strike, the quarter would formally end this past Friday, as if nothing had happened. That meant that grades were due Friday. The grading deadline is a stressful time, just by default. Now throw in the strike interruption (during which we could not enter grades into the system). I can't crawl around inside their shiny golden heads, but the decision to barge forward "all is normal" felt punitive. As a writing teacher, the deadline meant that I would have grade the notebooks of THREE classes this past work week, instead of one.

Grading notebooks for a writing teacher is a highly personalized, formalized, and usually time-intensive undertaking. Grading notebooks for three classes in one week - approximately 65 of them - plus doing it carefully, is probably an insane undertaking. Nevertheless, I was staring at notebooks past 9:30 P.M. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. I am never doing that again - I don't care if the whole country goes on strike.

I have repeatedly asked myself if leaving my last district to come to work in this challenging-as-all-hell environment was the right decision. I have really wondered if was going to be able to hack it here. I have experienced pretty significant impostor syndrome. I have struggled and felt like a failure repeatedly, especially with my large group of freshmen, and my really challenging giant group of sophomores too. I have second-guessed myself: "Did I really go into all those interviews and claim that I was "a pretty advanced classroom manager?" I mean, am I, after all?" Shit like that. A lot of it. I feel like a rookie, which I definitely am not.

But the notebooks got dealt with. My grades were in on time. I absolutely LOVE my coworkers, and bosses. This staff is amazing. I have a free three-day weekend, free of papers to grade. We fired up the fire pit last night and grilled out. I am watching soccer this afternoon. When things have been really hard for me, I always find it reassuring to remind myself that "This is the life I've chosen." I chose to be where I am, which is at a fantastic school that is doing kick-ass things for the kids of Austin, East Garfield Park, Homan Square, and North Lawndale, with all that choice entails, the good, the bad, and in-between. No one said teaching high school with CPS was going to be a sparkle-pony picnic. I'll be back where I belong, in my classroom, on Tuesday; after a VERY hard-earned three-day weekend. I don't know if or when I will feel like "I got this" as a CPS teacher working on the west side. But in this profession, I also know that feelings of "I got this" tend to be fleeting and miragical, anyway, and sometimes even a little dangerous.

I'll proceed.