Success Story (where it should be posted)

In education, people like to talk a lot about how classrooms should be “student-centered.” Oddly enough, however, when it comes to the way we evaluate teachers, we typically think of our successes and failures in a teacher-centered vacuum, as if the students themselves had little or nothing to do with the process. My success and failure stories are basically a bold and resounding refutation of any such notion. It is the students who learn, and the students who, ultimately, bear the responsibility for their own education. As a teacher, I have a job to do. My job is to present an opportunity, to open the doors of education as wide as I know how. But it is the students who must walk through. I cannot carry them.

Not teaching a state-tested subject, I have no quantified results to point to and justify myself as a good teacher. The evidence of my success is subjective and entirely non-standardized. I have only the word of the next teacher down the line, the calculus, pre-calculus, and trigonometry teacher at my school, who once informally told me good things about my former students. I have nothing else to go on but my own instincts.

So I write about my own subjective feeling of success. As such, my other Algebra II class comes to mind, and not merely for the sake of symmetry. This past spring, 3rd block Algebra II was my failure story, but 1st block Algebra II was hands-down the best class I’ve ever taught, bar none. They wanted to learn. They were respectful. They listened. They tried. And they learned. And what do you know, the majority of them (i.e. all those who really tried) passed—a remarkable fact in itself! I loved them, and they loved me. I pushed them as I try to push all my students, and they respected me as a tough teacher.

But I cannot take credit. It was the students. By some accident of the school schedule, I got a lot of our best students lumped into that one class, and that’s the honest truth. One of my girls would literally cheer every time I gave homework or announced a test! Another girl, a ninth grader, got a perfect score on her state Biology I test—and neither of these were even my best student! One of the boys, English was his favorite subject. He said Algebra II was the hardest class he’d ever had, but he still tried, and he passed. I’m proud of all of them. The fact is, I had so many really good students in that class that they outnumbered the underachievers. The class tone was positive because of them, and I had to do so little to maintain it.

Last Christmas, my sister gave me a dozen white Beanie Baby teddy bears embroidered with the logo, “I [heart] Mississippi.” Apparently, they came from the surplus stock of some sort of Katrina fund raiser. Anyway, I used the Beanie Babies for a guessing game at the beginning of the year. A few of my students asked if they could have one, which I just answered with some vague deflection. At the end of the year, I decided to reward my best class by giving out these bears as rewards. I asked my students to come up with funny and not-so-funny award nominations to give each other (not unlike Teacher Corps summer school)—then I had fun choosing among them and making up my own titles. Then I gave the bears away to my most deserving students, and they really seemed to appreciate it.

My Student of the Year was an adorable 11th grader. Despite the respectable competition from her classmates, “Gretchen” always managed to get the highest score on all of my tests except one. Early in the semester, she won me over by asking me to attend her basketball games. No one had actually invited me to watch them play before. She would wave to me when she saw me in the stands, and so I kept coming to her games. At one point, she came to see me after school to apologize. She had not realized that I had to walk home after the games, and so she felt guilty for asking me to come! She was such a nice girl, one of my favorite students ever. She is really smart in math, but I worry for her because I noticed her writing is pretty poor. I worry that her poor grammar may hold he back a little bit when it comes to the ACT, college, etc. Then again, she will do fine in life, because she is quite bright and has a great attitude.

At the end of the year, some of my students in the class wrote “we love you, Mr. A” messages on the board. I wrote a message telling them they were my best class and I really enjoyed teaching them, which was the honest truth.