« oh, hell. | Main | letting other voices speak »
March 03, 2005
tj 308: feeling guilty p.2
(p.1 is in lj; p.3 was 2 days ago, but there's no more room in that for punitive reflection.)
molly's got 308 today without me, because it's thursday, and right now i'm pretty sure that they're in better hands. tuesday i was a dust-devil, spinning up a mess in amorphous form, scattering debris all over the place, demonstrating, i'm sure, to someone who at some point, in the interest of potential pilot programs and the like, is going to have to offer some evaluative commentary about me, that i'm a complete & total scatterbrain with no... classroom management skills? (when i was in education, "classroom management" was a good term. now it sounds authoritarian and emperialistic &... ::shudder::)
despite being an undeniably cool word, "dervish" is not usually the type of descriptor one wants to see on one's evaluations.
on one hand, i really don't feel like it was that disasterous... yes, it looked chaotic as hell, but most of the students--as individual students, although not so much as a collective--knew what was going on or were in close communication with me to get on track. they were writing, reflecting, responding, gathering materials, reading over old work, evaluating, thinking, occasionally collaborating... and i was bouncing from table to table to spot-solve problems, & interrupting them for general announcements when someone would bring something up that i thought everybody needed to hear... it was productive chaos, meaningful noise.
on the other, i feel like i'm letting molly down because she needs to be coming into a class with a plan and a focus and a movement to join, not just a rubble-heap that it'll be her problem to organize & control, like quelling a pirate-ship mutiny. i feel like even if i'm not throwing her into a feeding-frenzy, i'm giving her the impression i am. i feel like even if she's got other reasons to believe i'm probably competent, the example i portray has to be undermining that idea.
and tuesday, when she told me that she was totally okay with doing a lot more being-in-charge-of and letting me step down, i feel incredibly guilty to admit that i was relieved. they're my kids, i don't want to leave them; it's my job & i can handle it; i took this task on and i can carry it out... and i want to resent the offer, and i want even more to decline, but i know i'm slipping, i know i've got too many balls in the air, and impressions and faith are part of it... even if i'm relatively sure that i can fall such that the only knees i really skin are my own, this kind of jester-jumping can't be convincing them. can't be reassuring. can't make the structure-hungry ashleys secure or keep the loose-knit toms in line. can't give anybody the impression that i know jack shit about what a classroom leader ought to do or, god forbid, that i know anything at all about the content of the course, which i don't think i've said anything to let her see (i'm guessing a few of our students believe it, anyway; i answer a few questions right, i don't always say "i don't know, let me look that up"; & if all else fails, my picture's in the "faculty & staff" box of the Blackboard site...)
i've done better. i don't think i'm doing them the disservice that it must look like i am, but i also know i could do far better by them. and while i know that, in the grand scheme, there will be classes that get less of the best of me, that don't gel, that won't look back on me as being any kind of hero whatsoever, if i'm worth remembering at all. and i feel like that jeopardizes me in some ways, like it discredits not only my intentions but those of the people--and programs--i (intentionally or otherwise) represent.
Posted by ttobryan at March 3, 2005 01:45 PM