Overwhelming

As I sat in my classroom today, I perfectly understood the feeling of burn out many teachers face.  In fact, I think I felt it.  Imagine if you will a person in perfect health standing in the middle of a lifeboat.  She is strong and sure of her step; she is positive she will survive.  All around her are those in need of her.  They are drowning...some quickly, some slowly.  Some barely have a mouth above water.  Others seem to be making life boats out of themselves but they are few and far in beween.  Some seem to be doing okay but need the person's coaching.  

As I sat in an overly large class of 30 today, I sat in the midst of some who were drowning.  Today's writing assignment connected in to the first assignment in which students had to draw themselves as symbols.  We wrote a paragraph per symbol the day before to explain which described us the most, and today was to be a day of introductions and conclusions.  I'm not dishonest when I tell you that in the classroom, there are students who have never even written two paragraphs before.  There are others who struggle to even finish the sentence starter and hook anecdote,  "when I was young"  So, I'm rotating from person to person and giving feedback and I notice I hear...Evans....Evans....Evans, different voices, different people, different needs.  Who shall I save from the land of underdeveloped writing? 

And that's just it.  That's the moment that I realize burnout is not necessarily the teacher's fault, a way of quitting on kids.  Sometimes, that burnout comes from when you realize that you could give your whole day and all of your hours and all of your weeks only to maybe save just one student from the unpleasant fate that awaits them.  Just one.  It's when you feel yourself drowning in a sea of great need, and the grief of not being able to save them all is more overwhelming than the quiet whisper of the one that makes it into the raft.  Let's be honest folks, if these students don't learn how to operate in the land of academia, the outcome is not good.  It's not as if they have a pleasant plan B awaiting them no matter their English skill.  They don't.  It's either you help them survive or they end up repeating the cyclical ridiculousness of their own poverty all over again. 

My kids don't wake up and say they want to be poor.  They don't wake up and say they want to have a writing deficit.  They wake up like any other child, willing to take in the beauty of whatever the teacher may have to offer.  But alas, if they are offered no beauty, if they are not offered the gift of independent thinking, they aren't given any other choices to be but poor.