Small Successes

It is sad to me that I have put this entry off for over a week... especially since the reason for putting it off is that it is something I really need to and want to think about. However, the fact that I will put such things off is only an indicator of the fact that I have indeed lost perspective in no small way.

The things I consider right now to be my small successes are things I haven't gotten to put on paper for anyone whose job is to make sure I'm doing my job, and since I always tend to go too long I'm just going to list the ones that come to mind and hope they stand out enough on their own to people who can sympathize:
--I have never had to call a parent or send a kid to the office to keep the class in control.
--My two special ed kids are among my top ten performers despite their D-averages outside my class. The father's of each have actually left their conferences with me trying to cover a lump in their throat after twenty minutes of my efforts to prove that their kids is not a screw-up in my class.
--I have sat through over a dozen intervention meetings with parents, teachers, the "problem" student and administrators, and, yet, I have walked into every one of them totally clueless as to what the behavioral problems could possibly be.
--I honestly believe that my students trust me to be fair, and, though they whine and occasionally erupt at my expectations of them, their complaints never seem to come up once that episode is over.

As it turns out, these things were actually the things I was most proud of in November. Pressure to hit the standards and "catch up" to the other physics teacher made me forget about these things, but now it's nice to think about them and give some credit to myself for them. Now though, I have to finish grading, to finish making solution sets, to draft some worksheets. There simply is not time to dwell more on this, though the energy it would give me would probably be more to the benefit of my students today than the worksheet I'm drafting. But maybe learning to make a choice even as small as "getting back to work" might seem, and learning not to mourn it too much if it turns out to be the wrong one, is also a small success.

I have put this entry off because, like Twain would point out, it is hard to write the short version of this. The longer is easier and so I put things like this off until they wake me at 3Am and leave me staring at the ceiling to ponder cracks--cracks up there and in any claim that these successes are in any way "small" to me.