Equanimity by Emily

A love letter to my first year of teaching.

1. That they feel confident in their own answers, without having to check them with me.

My students have many qualities that serve a person well in education—namely, curiosity, about anything and everything. So much of my day is spent answering questions with the slightest of stimuli. Many of my answers are made up.

Often, I wonder about the origin of this quality that manifests in so many of them. I wonder how many adults in their lives have pushed their questions aside as obnoxious or provided such shaky ground to stand on that curiosity is just another means of survival. Questioning if the world is still real. If the days are still passing in the same manner they always have.

Over the past year that I’ve spent with them, a lot of my energy has gone into teaching them how to channel their questions into productive curiosity—a means of challenging themselves to dig for deeper answers. I’ve tried to teach them appropriate moments for questions, and to try to trust that I’ll give them all the answers and information they need to be successful. But they know this is a lie. They’ve had too many teachers like me fail them. So they persist in poorly timed questions.

After months of our mutual fatigue, my attempts at regulating their curiosity manifests itself instead as rigidity for its own sake. “Not an appropriate question.” “Not now.” “Not now.” And I wonder why so much goes unanswered for them.

And yet, a ritual that has quietly accrued in my classroom is one that has persisted despite my best efforts. During the three minutes of—attempted—silence that start every class, where students answer (for once) a question I provide for them, a minimum of three per class raise their notebooks in the air, willing me to check their responses. Some of them are proud of what they’ve written and wish to show it off. Many are unsure if their answer is what I’m looking for. They’re afraid of getting it wrong.

I wish my students could feel like their answers are worth something, even if they aren’t exactly perfect. Teachers don’t always check.

2. That they bring a book with them to every class.

It’s a dangerous thing to start wishing your students were exactly like you as a child. The idea that my students’ world is even remotely comparable to what mine was is laughable. They have so much more on their plates.

But when I was in high school, one of my teachers remarked that I was her only student who brought a book to every class and read it before class began. Back then, I treated my books like a phone, and my phone like a book—which is to say, I spent a considerably higher amount of time with books than screens. My kids today don’t have that luxury. Their world is screens.

But I think a number of interpersonal conflicts that start before class even begins could be avoided if more of them brought books to class with them, to steal away the minutes before giving over to work time.

I had one student at the beginning of the year slip me a sticky note, asking for book recommendations. It warmed my heart more than I can say. Now, she and several of her peers form a small but significant percentage of my students whom I have to reprimand for having books open when they should be paying attention. My attempts to correct them, though, are halfhearted. They’ve judged that what they’re reading is more important than what I’m saying—they’ve judged right.

So much of our world comes down to reading, so much so that to deny reading to our students is to deny a basic civil right. Reading is required to apply for a job. It’s required to understand when you’re being lied to by people who claim to know more. It’s a requirement to understand the life we’ve been given, and we gamble with it far too frequently. I hate that I can’t yet close the achievement gap I’ve been handed, but I can start by passing sticky notes to my quiet students with book recommendations. And smiling when they steal small moments to read before class.

3. That they lose their bite, without losing their wit.

The other day, two of my female students asked me who I thought the funniest student in the class was. This was a hard one, because my students make me laugh constantly. I firmly believe every generation is funnier than the last. Comedy is a survival response to pain, and the world only gets more difficult. So the humor can play on, at least.

I knew they wouldn’t believe me, but I told these two students that they, in fact, were two of the funniest people I had yet met. They had expected me to choose a boy student, a class clown. But at this age, at least, few of the boys are able to be witty the way the girls can. I could remember one instance of this female student going off on one of her classmates for failing—yet again—to listen when the teacher (me) was talking. She had completely lost patience with him, even when I hadn’t quite yet. And I had laughed about it the rest of the day.

The sharper middle schoolers have a keen sense of the ironies in life, but too many of them have also honed a treasured ability to take down their peers with harsh words. They can cut each other to the quick like it’s nothing at all. I suppose, when they are together for the entire day, it is only natural that they feel entitled to keep each other in line, altogether unkindly.

Our world needs much more laughter and joy, but it needs far fewer bullies. I just hope—as I try to educate my students out of their propensity for harsh words—I don’t educate them out of their comedic timing, too.

4. That they bring a pencil to class every day.

One of the gifts of teaching middle school is watching kids’ priorities shift. Over the year that I’ve taught my students, I’ve watched them change from worrying about who is line leader to wondering who is interested in them. Several students confided in me over the course of the year that they and their crush were planning to have their first hug at recess. Later in the year, I saw notes passed that conveyed far more mature “firsts.” The thousand or so people who told me “it’s a hard age to teach” when I told them I taught 6^th grade weren’t kidding.

And it makes sense that students’ priorities will often have nothing to do with school. Different things matter to us at different stages of life. At my students’ stage of life, their priority is their crush, their friend group, and their family. I can’t fault them any of these.

But I can remind them to bring a pencil every single day, and it will still never happen. It’s just not a priority.

5. That they always invite the new kid to sit with them at lunch.

I teach at a school that is so drastically different from the one I went to when I was their age. The same twenty kids make up one class, and they are together all day, every day. The same core group of fifteen students has been together since they were three years old, and the other five are a rotating cast of characters, shifting from one school to the next. But even they become enmeshed so quickly. It’s impossible not to.

I interviewed a new student to start at our school six weeks into the second semester—a horrible time to start at a new school. As I reassured her how much she would love it at our school—and of course I was earnest in wanting to make the transition as easy as possible—I knew it would be doubly challenging. The other students were already clamoring for new fodder for the rumor mill.

In my limited abilities to control adolescent behavior as a first-year teacher, I played one of the few cards in my arsenal—directing the new student toward a group of five girls who desperately wanted a new friend, for the simple reason that one more friend made them all the richer. And they loved her immediately. Any small moment where she sat alone, they invited her to sit with them instead. Now, she’s indistinguishable as a new student.

I never had that power, at their age, or even now. I try to grow to be more like them, and I pray that this quality of theirs never goes away.

6. That they can read a few paragraphs with ease.

One of the biggest shocks of starting teaching this year was the extent to which my students view text as a locked door. They have every capability of reading words, but to decipher a five-paragraph essay is to scale Mount Everest. As I see them staring at it, I can feel the way it taunts them. And my heart breaks.

I hate that this addition has to stand as a wish for my students, and not something I have more power to accomplish. When I become the teacher I want to be, I’ll remove it. But for now, I give it all I can. And I pray.

7. That they know when to listen without interruption.

My students have incredibly powerful voices. I undergo daily cognitive dissonance, as I discipline them for poorly timed outbursts. As someone who has always been known for being soft-spoken and talked over, it took me most of the year to realize it is not normal for students to offer interruptions for their teacher in thirty-second increments. Well, it’s certainly normal. But it should not be accepted.

When I say nearly every day is a battle of arming myself with the proper tools for disciplining my students who can’t pause to raise their hand without losing my patience—or my temper—I am still vastly underselling the truth. I teach students who never lived without the instant gratification of technology. It only gets worse with each passing year.

Learning is about trying what you haven’t before, and venturing into unknown territory. It’s messy, and often loud. It’s scary, and requires freedom of expression.

But learning is also about listening. So too is life itself. I couldn’t teach my students this in one school year. Maybe no one can. But the lessons they will learn from a well-intentioned period of listening are far greater than the noisy chaos will create. I am almost sure of it.

8. That they begin with apology, not anger.

This is a hard one for me to separate my personal life experiences from those of my students. I’ve spent most of my life apologizing for one thing or another. I prefer timidity to tension. It’s always been the easier path for me.

For many of my students, it’s another story. To apologize is monumental, while to fly off the handle seeking revenge is the most natural thing in the world. Too many of my mediations of classroom conflicts have involved me asking: “Did you say you were sorry?” “Did you ask nicely?” “Did you nicely ask her to stop?” The answer is nearly always no.

There’s surely a middle ground between my own penchant for apology, and my students’ desire for retribution. I pray we both find it someday.

9. That they know they deserve the education they receive, and more.

At my school, the junior high team is almost entirely male. Apart from myself and my fellow sixth-grade teacher, there are no female teachers. The seventh and eighth grade students only are only taught by women during elective time, one day of the week.

At first, it baffled me that the seventh and eighth grade female students were so friendly toward me. They would greet with a bright smile, and a “Hi, miss!” They would beam when asked how their day was going. And sometimes, they wandered into my classroom after school to say hi. They desperately needed a female teacher.

One day, two of the seventh grade students wandered around my classroom while I cleaned up, reminiscing about the previous school year when this had been their homeroom. They spoke fondly of last year’s teacher, who had “left in the middle of the year because we were too much to handle.” My jaw dropped at the nonchalance with which she had said this. In her eyes, it was a simple fact. She and her peers were too much for shiny, new teachers.

On the one hand, I completely understand that teacher’s pain. I’ve felt it more days out of the school year than I can count. It looks like driving home in complete silence because nothing sounds the way it used to. It sounds like tossing and turning in the middle of the night from worry over students you know you can never reach. It’s unbearable.

But at the same time, my heart breaks for this student and her friend, and all my kids. While they would never say it, it’s statements like this that tell me they have internalized an idea of themselves as terrible students. This manifests itself as defiance and detachment in the classroom, and an unwillingness to try.

This, above all, is my wish for my kids. That they never ever proudly pronounce to a teacher that they are “too much to handle.” That they know the learning they are worthy of.

10. That they return for more advice—five, ten, twenty years later.

I’ll end with a selfish wish, one for me as much as my students. But it’s one that reminds me I’m still a teacher, even though I left this year feeling more defeat than joy.

Being a teacher means investing in your students far more than the curriculum states. It means watching them grow as they meet new experiences with trepidation. What a tragedy it would be if the last I saw of my students was when their stories were only just beginning.

But more than that, I want to know that I made my classroom a safe space for my students this year. That they knew I cared for them beyond their test scores and measurable abilities. It’s not the sort of thing I can tell them. They have to know. And there is so much more to learn. I hope they come back. I’ll still be here.