Every month I have to count up my failures, compile them into spreadsheets, analyze them, break them down into categories of gender and race, and list everything I've done to combat the failure, and turn all these numbers in to my boss. No one asks for a breakdown of my successes, only my failures. So I stare at them all the time.
The semester is winding down, and I still have 27 students failing. I was thinking about failure today, and began to realize that I have never been set up to fail before doing this job. I always got good grades, was able to learn Spanish, travel the world, and so many other things. Even at Heritage I cannot recall students actually failing, especially not over 10% of my students, because my interventions were always successful, at least enough to pull them up to a D and pass.
The obstacles are insurmountable by just me. Home lives a wreck, students dealing with emotional fallout from extreme abuse, students making poor choices, incorrigible insolence, and an ineffective discipline structure, all combined with a textbook that is not very good and I have come to detest.
As I look at my failures now, I am trying harder than I ever have before. I care just as much as I always have, perhaps even more. My heart breaks every day over my students, but maybe I just don't know how to show it. Nothing gets through. They may change for a bit, but not enough to pass.
The school sets the bar for teachers very high, in an effort to make AYP (annual yearly progress, a No-Child-Left-Behind thing), in an effort to get us to jump just a bit higher ourselves. But the high expectations can backfire when they are perceived to be impossible and just leave me feeling hopeless.
All of this means that every day I drive home a failure and full of failures from that day, which is totally new for me. I am not used to failure, and the constant failure in my job is very difficult to handle.
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I wrote the previous part last night, and then came to 2 Corinthains 12 in my devotions this morning: God's grace is sufficient, and his power is made perfect in weakness. I will boast in my weaknesses (and failures), so that Christ's power may rest on me, for when I am weak, then I am strong.
So I give these failures over to God, asking Him to be strong in those situations, because I have come to the end of myself and it is not good enough.
