Letting Go

A website called "Tiny Buddha" listed blogging as an example of a creative outlet that can help one let go of stress, anger, and the like.  So here I am.  Poised and ready to let go.

I am feeling rather wrung out at present.  The harsh reality is, I have direct responsibility for my feeling wrung out.  Not total responsibility, but responsibility just the same.  I want resolution, and sometimes there isn't any.  Sometimes there is just the lesson.

So all school year, I have worked with a student who is the single most challenging student of my career.  I won't bore you with specifics.  To quote Jerry Maguire, I would love to say to this girl "you don't know what it's like to be me, out here for you.  It is an up at dawn, pride swallowing seige that I will never fully tell you about!"  I have spent hours of non-contracted, unpaid time in meetings with her and her family, developing behavior plans for her, thinking about how to help her, communicating with all her teachers to try - against all odds, it seemed - to find a way to help her start passing some classes.  You could say I'm not exactly objective when it comes to this girl.

Part of this pride swallowing seige, though, has been a trust and a rapport that developed between us.  When she started to make impressive strides as a student, I felt so proud of her.  I felt as if my work was not in vain.  I should add that this kind of stuff is why I became a teacher.  Not my insatiable love of literature, or a masochistic desire to grade essays.  I am a teacher because I love watching teenagers transform themselves.

Last week she clearly gave up.  Worse, I could see her dragging her best friend, a girl who had a 0.7 first semester and now has a 3.5, down with her.  She became disrespectful as all hell, in an assortment of charming ways.  I was angry.  Scratch that - I was FURIOUS.

But naturally, as teachers (oh, and as mothers!  So for me, all the f-ing time) we're supposed to be the model of patient, empathic communication.  We are expected to respond and never to react.  Well, twice last week, I full on reacted to this student, and I own it.  She reacted back by screaming at me and cussing me out.  It was so dramatic that you could say she went out in a blaze of glory.

Now, she's no longer my student, I have heard nothing from her mother (except that my initial email to tell her about the incident was "one sided"), and I have a lingering dark cloud of guilt for not responding to it all with the smiling face of the Dalai Lama. I feel maligned, deeply disrespected and completely discounted.  Did I make some mistakes here?  Sure.  But the fact is, the same personality that allows me to connect with and truly love my students has an underbelly - and it's called a temper.

I can discuss all this with my principal, and maybe (but probably not) with her, but ultimately the letting go - and the learning - is on me.  Right now, I feel really sad (though significantly less so than at the start of writing this!), but hope that this will become another milepost in my journey, one at which I learned something that actually did inch me closer to responding to hate with love, to sadness with joy, and to anger with peace.

3 more days, and then onto summer!  And with it, blog posts about long, lazy summer days with my busy, brilliant little toddler.