A Difficult Discovery

Today I am trying to grade my students, am failing, and have walked smack into my own arrogance and am now drowning in frustration. For the last month they have been filling in reading/writing notebooks and on Friday I collected them. They are so messy and haphazard that I don't even know how to apply the rubric to them. And so I am having a melt-down since grades are due. I am nine weeks in and I am not the teacher I yet want to be.

I think the hardest discovery one can ever make is that we are flawed.
And the higher one holds them self in their own esteem, the harder this discovery is. As someone who uses his confidence to prop himself up like crutches when the world has cut his feet out from under him I am now tottering.

And I am not talking about flaws like being a little overweight, or blushing too easily.
I am talking about the flaw of failure. The flaw of realizing that the worst part about trying is failing. And even with a keen understanding that failure is only permanent when one quits- this still sucks. And now as I feel that I am failing as a teacher in so many ways- I can suddenly understand why so many of my kids will not try harder. I am pouring myself into this teaching job like trying to fill a swimming pool with a gallon of milk. And even if it is just a kiddy pool, my efforts still seem massively unproductive. I am standing at the ocean's edge and waving my arms frantically trying to blow the hurricane off track and away from everything I believe in. If life seems this daunting to me, someone who has been blessed mostly with success and inordinate amounts of support, well I can only imagine what my kids feel like when they fail, and most of them haven't even been taught how to fail.

This is where my parents tell me to trust in God. This is where I get upset at God for not making me invincible. This is where I stand and face myself and tell myself that each time I fail I must get stronger, and I must not focus on the failure, but looking away doesn't seem to help either. This is where I realize that God needs to be my crutch, not my pride. And then I counter that, maybe just to be argumentative: Don't I need to do the work anyways? So trusting in God... obviously important, but practically seems very similar to fighting tooth and nail not to fail using my own stubbornness and focusing on one step at a time.

This is the part of life that needs to be a montage. And this is the part of life that needs to be learned from. And this is the part of myself that I need to stop picking at like a scab and rather than focusing on the bleeding I need to face myself and find perfection in my flaws. And I need to slowly improve on those flaws, but not too slowly, because these kids, these parents, and my principal are all trusting their lives and a bit of their future to me.