Ms. Schmidt or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombed Days

Haunting moments and affirming moments resurface daily from the summer. It's like I have a pensieve that I peer into every night, and all these memories come swirling into view.

"M'Schmidt, why can't you get some order in here?"  "Are y'all real teachers?" "I don't appreciate the way you been lookin' at me all summer. You lookin' at me like you don't like me." Then there was the girl who would ask every day on her way into breakfast, "You teachin' today?" "Yes, I teach every day." Blank stare. There's the image of one of the students cleaning up the room on the last day and taking down the "Classroom Teachers" sign, tearing off all the names except "Ms. Stewart" and "Ms. Lawrence," and then taping the sign back on the wall. 

I guess it's mostly the hauntings that pull me in.

The failures abound. Every day I came out of the classroom having no idea whether or not I actually taught the kids what I went in there to teach. All I knew was that someone flicked the overhead on and off, and five other people talked back when I gave out a writing assignment. I was so caught up in my living nightmare of management that I had no idea what kind of learning, if any, was taking place.

The weird and kind of scary thing is that I don't feel bad about what happened this summer. I feel almost embarrassingly at peace with what went on in English 11/12. The reality: two kids were expelled under my watch, and we could have prevented it; I could have prevented it with better management. Those kids needed that credit. The reality: there are kids in the class who should have failed but whom we could not in good faith fail because we did not have proper documentation. The reality: someone could have really gotten hurt in that room. And we were incredibly lucky that no one did. How can I be a good person and feel ok about this? How can I feel ok about utterly failing 27 kids who showed up every day, in theory, to learn?

The only explanation I have is that I know I did all I could with all I had every day this summer. I typically got 4-5 hours of sleep. If I wasn't planning for my kids, I was talking about them, trying to figure out what went wrong and how I could change the next day. I woke up at 5:30 and started over. I felt sick to my stomach many mornings, and I showed up. Every day I was there with a thorough plan, hurriedly navigated finicky copy machines, and forced myself to tell students things that would have been much easier unsaid in the moment. Every day I faced the students, and I faced myself.

This John Wesley quote comes to mind: 

“Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.”

I feel like I did no less. Yes, there were countless mistakes and things I should have done differently, but I tried. I tried something fierce.

Ok, the affirmations, the little lights that flicker for a moment like a lightning bug in a night thick with Mississippi kudzu:

The three students who wrote on their evaluations that I was a particularly helpful teacher this summer. The several students who named one of my lessons as the favorite or most important thing they learned this summer. The boy who rushed in one morning and blurted, "Ms. Schmidt, I made a 20 on my ACT on my first try!" The girl who came to me during break one day--"Ms. Schmidt, I'm really having an issue with someone else in the class, and I wanted to let you know before something happens, and I disrupt the class." The boy who came in after a day of absence and said, "Good morning, Ms. Schmidt. I missed your class yesterday." 

I feel like resilience was one of the most important things we could have learned this summer. Showing up with a plan and ready to start a new day--sometimes that's all we'll have going for us this year. I made it through the summer. I made it through the summer. I can make it through the first nine weeks. And the second, the third, the fourth. Keep moving forward day by day. 

It's weird to think that only my students this summer will know me as "Ms. Schmidt." "Ms. Schmidt" will stay locked in time at Holly Springs High. I can see her at the overhead awkwardly positioning the transparency to fit on the screen. It's Mrs. Gray who will show up to teach sixth grade in August. Ok, class, let's try this again. 

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