Success

 Success Story.  Describe, in detail, a success story from your first year of teaching.

   I feel like this is such a loaded prompt.  If you downplay your success in the classroom you come off sounding like you had a horrible year.  However, if you aggrandize your little accomplishments you sound like a total tool.  Yeesh, I guess the reality of the situation is that I fall somewhere in between.  I think that's the case with most people.  The unfortunate thing about most of our successes, though, comes from the fact that these stories are so embedded in the teachers and not the students.  I look back at the moments where kids praised what I was doing and I think, "There, that's success."  Talk about selfishness. That moment had nothing to do with the students and everything to do with me.  So I've been racking my brain to find some evidence of student growth that had nothing to do with kids complimenting me, giving me pictures, or simply telling me they were learning something.  In all honesty, I came up with nothing.  I guess I attached too much of my success to how I felt my kids felt, something I definitely want to change next year.  So I had to settle on the two things for which I'm most proud:

1.  Toward the end of the year, I had a bell ringer that asked my students to describe how they thought they'd changed over the year or how they felt they were different from last year.  I'd asked them to complete this assignment shortly after I'd received news that I was going to be moving up to 8th grade with them because I realized I was going to have the privilege of seeing my kids develop through two of the most tumultuous years of their life.  All of the sudden, I was so curious to know how they felt they'd changed already.  Anyway, I thought I was going to get a lot of answers about getting taller, getting boyfriends and girlfriends, or becoming cooler.  Social stuff.  Topics of this nature tended to dominate their writing, and I expected this to be the same.  I ended up being surprised by most of the answers because more times than not, the changes had something to do with academics.  There were two answers that humbled me more than the others because they were from two of my favorite students, Nolean and Allison.  Both of them claimed that they read more these days than they did before.  Now, I do have to give some credit to Stephenie Meyer and her Twilight series for being a big hit with my kiddos, but I feel that in some small way I had something to do with it too.  Though I can't say I had the best lessons or the most structured room, I can say that I showed enthusiasm for books.  I tried to fill my room with books, I read aloud to my kids constantly, and I really pushed my advanced classes by making them read The Giver, Walk Two Moons, and The Diary of Anne Frank.  I think I might have gotten a few students to read a little more than they usually did, and the fact that two of my most beloved students seemed to agree gave me one of the few gratifying experiences during my year.  As cheesy as it sounds, those bell ringers couldn't have come at a better time, as I almost ended the year feeling too down on myself for my performance.

2.  My second success was simple: I did not quit.  Towards March and April, I gave considerable thought to quitting the program because I was sad most of the time, lethargic/unhealthy, and felt I was making no contribution to education at all.  My mom was really worried about me and begged me to just come home, so I looked at teacher vacancies nearly every night on the internet.  She kept telling me that I had changed into a person that she didn't recognize.  And I knew exactly what she meant.  The only thing that kept me going was the promise that I might get to teach alongside Funt in the 8th grade the next year.  I don't know what I would have done without Funt, Hayman, Brin, and Goldwasser around to be my cheerleaders.  If not for them, I don't think I would have had any motivation to get out of bed in the morning.  Most other people just seemed to assume that I was doing fine, but nothing could be farther from the truth.  In the end, I stuck it out, and I'm glad I did.  Looking back, things weren't really that bad.  Nothing was more than I could handle at any given time.  I think I was just exhausted and disappointed in myself.  A daily dose of that can really stifle a person.  When I think about this measly little success, I'm reminded of Parks' story about the little girl/boy saving starfish one by one on the beach, even though the task is monumental.  I can hear him saying, "But I saved that one.  But I saved that one."  Well, I can't say that I really saved any.  But I CAN say that I'm still on the beach.  That counts for a lot in my book.