An Epilogue to a Former Disaster

I was an annoyingly eager 22-year-old over-achiever when I made my first attempt at teaching.  I knew in the moment that I was doing a lot of things right:  my lessons were thoroughly planned, my expectations were intense, I had variety and spice programmed into each day, but I made a mess of it all in no time flat.

I was terrible with classroom management.  I was sassy when questioned by parents, colleagues, or administrators.  I burnt myself out by working from 6am-6pm each day, skipping lunch, and making sure I wrote a novel on each essay.  Although I was above-average at building relationships with students, I quickly fell out of love with the process of teaching.

I was very invested in my students’ lives and I took their struggles, both academic and otherwise, personally, and I forgot that teaching is much more than just throwing creative darts against a wall hoping for a bullseye.  Even if they are creative darts, you can only survive chaos for so long. 

My frustration with certain students became very transparent; my patience waned to a point that I was getting bitter at an alarming speed.  Outside factors definitely contributed to this including censorship issues with parents and athletes expecting special treatment, but I had lost sight of my job.

I mistakenly thought my role was to make everyone love literature and writing as much as I did.  I wanted everyone to weep when they read Hemingway and want to be David Sedaris’ next best friend.  I couldn’t see that perhaps my job was simply to inspire my D- students to achieve a C…and I couldn’t see that I was dampening the experience for both my students and myself with this strive for perfection.

So I left. And I was at peace with it.

Now I am older, and I realize after living through the stumbles and falls of the real world that “winning” is about much more than getting 100%.  It is this knowledge, and the specter of my love for literature, that has me going back. 

This fall, I am opening a classroom door to sixtyish 6^th graders who will test my patience, be apathetic about my lessons, and will not all succeed, at least in a traditional sense.  The difference now is that I am okay with this and it doesn’t frighten me anymore. 

Age has brought a different type of confidence in me, one not born of the arrogance and misguided perfection of youth, but one constructed out of hope and trust.  I believe that I will impact each of my students in a positive way.  I know that my students will leave my classroom in May more literate than when they came.  If I am lucky, many will even move on inspired and focused and enlightened. 

I’m ready to win under these circumstances, and I am ready to teach in a way that will make this happen.  I’m not the same teacher I was before, the one who was dead-set on perfecting every child, now I am taking the Alexandra approach and blazing a new trail…maybe not in a Nebraskan farmland…but in providing opportunities for each student to be themselves, but better, at least for 90 minutes a day when they’re with me. 

Britt Jungck is a literacy teacher at Bunger Middle School in Waterloo. After a ten year hiatus in the world of workforce development and grant writing, she is returning to her first love this year...literature. She has three sons, three dogs, a cat and runs long distances to avoid doing all the laundry haunting her in her basement.