It's crunch time at work, and being a teacher it means grade cards, testing and stress. One of the assessments I do 3 times a year is a fluency test called the DIBELS. Each kid reads for one minute, 3 different stories, and it is supposed to give me a an idea of what a student can do. A kid in the "red" most likely is having trouble with comprehension, mainly from the butchering of clue words that kids need to help them answer questions. If you cannot pronounce, "mathematician," do you even know what it is? If you substitute the word "ventilation" with some gibberish word, how do you really know the context of the sentence? So today I'm yawning through this first round of testing. Listening to 28 kids read the same three stories over and over is not what I initially signed up for when I became a teacher.
I envisioned chalk-white hands and dusty erasers (everything is dry-erase now), the endless grinding of a pencil sharpener (they are mostly electric) and the looks of children as diverse as a rainbow (that's been pretty much true). Instead I have piles of test packets, endless data, purchased books that go unopened and several yawns during a DIBELS test. Amid the testing and entering grades in a computer, there are times when the relationships and the essence of what makes a kid a kid go unnoticed. The whispering of kids being mean to one another goes unheard. The absences go unnoticed until the zeroes string along in the grade book. By that time, the call home becomes shuffled in burying priorities. By the time one kid's behavior is analyzed and investigated, another crisis awaits.
Personally, and publicly too, there are standards that I feel will never truly be accomplished. My wife and I are taking a parenting class, and sometimes what gets translated is that we, as imperfect humans, place so much emphasis on what others see, how the world judges it, that it undoubtedly leads to performance hurdles that we never can leap. A kid makes a bad decision with a substitute teacher and I think it must be something to do with my classroom management. A kid gets made fun of over the span of several weeks, only to have their parent inform me of what is happening. The kid chose to keep it a secret from me makes me feel like I didn't do enough. How did I not account for their inner pain?
There's lots of talk about kids that "fall through the cracks." Teachers become wimpy Atlas figures, carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. The lack of counselors, the changing curriculum, a revolving door of administrators. The only constant is us, gingerly hanging on to a round globe of risk, emotions and the malleable souls of 25 plus kids each year. And each year the globe tilts and brings us to our knees. We prevail at times, only momentarily, as so no one can boast. And just when you think you have it made, a new student arrives, equipped only with an eager face and an empty bookbag.
I confessed in parenting class last week that I always feel like I'm in "teacher mode." I leave the loudness of a class to the bustle of my own kids. My girl is a sassy 6, decked in purples and blues and the cutest smile in Ohio. My boy is part obsessive and part pessimist, but all heart. He falls into a grump state for falling one color short of perfection at school (the color all kids want to be behaviorally is pink which is considered "outstanding." He "falls" to purple which signifies "good"). He's cursed with my sense of compulsion to get things right, even though the goal is sometimes insurmountable. He strikes out once in baseball, he thinks he'll "never get a hit again." And this week I've been just closing my eyes listening to him complain about how strict our house became in 2014 concerning playing time and homework.
In December, my son turned in 2 incomplete homework packets. Now, I can bitch and moan about having him even do his homework like other parents do on Facebook, but we don't. He even had a packet during the Christmas break that we realized needed to be completed the Saturday before school started back up. Now I know how my mom felt when I told her I had a project on pyramids the night before it was to be turned in. Suddenly, the declarations of being the worst parent ever stream from the lungs of my son. Do I share this conversation with my parenting class next week?
Tonight in class the topic was perfect parenting vs. spiritual parenting. It was a time to look at our practices. Do we, as Christian parents, feel the weight of onlookers when our kids act up? I admit to feeling the sting of judgement if Cruz doesn't get his homework done. We're both teachers, so of course all homework and school rules will be upheld to the fullest extent of the law!
But perfect parenting is obsessed on the routines, behaviors and structure of obedience. We want our kids to be "good" in public, especially in public, because the world's eyes are cruel and piercing. My son still has problems getting dressed in the morning on his own, or keeping track of things maybe other kids don't. In his fourth grade little mind, life is "unfair." It's not so much unfair as trivial. The time we spend grasping the straws of obedience allows us to miss the teachable moments.
So this past week we went back to our fundamentals. We prayed before bed. We hugged, we snuggled. That's one thing that will matter when he's in front of his teachers, droning on and on over some test. Because when it's done, it will be simply completed for the moment. It won't stick. None of these tabulated measures will matter in the end. Complete them we will, but the heart remains with God. For that, I'm thankful and relieved. The globe just got a little easier to carry.
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