Monitoring Comprehension at a Scenic Overlook

“You must do that which you think you cannot.” Eleanor Roosevelt said that. I’m not sure what she was referring to exactly, what some of her moments of great self-doubt may have been, but whatever they were, she must have overcome them. Earlier this evening I was reminded of this quote, and a moment this past summer when I’d written it down. At one point or another, I wrote about it while preparing to be a career teacher for the very first time. I was terrified.

The day before my first day of school, I was frantically making posters for my classroom and stopped to play a nervous song on guitar. I strummed a simple four-chord pattern and began to invent lyrics on the spot. What I distinctly recall echoing as the chorus of that impromptu composition was as follows; “I’m freaking / I am scared / I feel totally unprepared / Yes, I don’t think I can do this shit / No, I don’t think that I can do it”.

Well – it’s now March. I don’t know why, but as I walked to the bus stop in Hunts Point at 7:00 PM this evening (another late night at the office, I might say), I felt like I was standing on the other side of a tremendous hill. I am not even close to the end of this journey, but it’s almost as if I’ve made it to a scenic checkpoint, a highway rest stop if you will, and can look back and marvel at what I’ve done so far. “Wow,” I think. “I climbed that.”

There are months left to teach before the close of the year. And yeah, many of my students are not making the dramatic gains that Teach for America had so definitively convinced me they were going to make. But I’m a good teacher who treats students with a tremendous amount of patience and respect. I think creatively every day about how I can get some of my kids to improve and feel good about themselves in the process. I am really excited for my future as a teacher and voice in American education. All in all, things are going nicely.

I do not have any answers, just my own reflections that you may find more or less useful. Like a good reader, I monitor what is happening in my life, try to make sense of it, consider it in relation to other knowledge I’ve attained and make predictions for what is to come. I have no idea how this week, month or year will end up, but at this point in the reading, I feel like I’m caught in the middle of a really good book.

Read on – rock on – live on,

Josh