The Day Jeff Blake Saved My Soul

Sometimes God acts through us. I witnessed this this past week when I got a package from my good friend from high school, Jeff. I opened the package to find a brand new copy of one of my favorite books, The Spitwad Sutras: Classroom Teaching as Divine Vocation by Robert Inchausti. It is about the author’s trials, tribulations, and revelations in his first year of teaching at an all boys Catholic High School in California. Anyone who went to an all boys high school will read it and immediately recognize the themes of pettiness, rudeness, youth, and boredom as well as the usual antics that occur whenever you get more than 100 boys together in one place at one time. Needless to say, this is one of my favorite books for its insight and relevance. Ultimately it is a praise of the struggles and triumphs of the classroom teacher. So, it was exactly what I needed in my life right now. Thanks, Jeff.

Here are two of my favorite quotes:
“’We don’t know how to teach them, ‘ Mike would say. ‘And they don’t know how to learn from us. So they use us as foils to figure out the system, in hopes that they’ll never have to grow up. And we don’t confront them about this, because we don’t have any alternatives to the system. The only thing we offer them is the intolerable option of becoming like us!’”
“To survive as a teacher, one must master the art of creative suffering. Like Ghandi’s nonviolent soldiers of truth, the dedicated teacher must walk into the assault of pettiness and disinterest every day with no expectation of victory – serene only in the hope that the abuse one endures is redemptive and encouraged by the conviction that teaching is, above all other things, an art of endurance.”

These insights have been very important to me as I’ve slowly been able to try to connect with my students over the short period of ten weeks. I think classes are going better but my students are still bored, and petty, and immature. I can’t make them grow up, they have to do that on their own. All I can do is hope that my work is helping them on their road to adulthood. Meanwhile, I’m learning just not to take the crap my students give me so personally.

In other news, the Ministry of Education has been here all week doing assessments and making everyone far too stressed out. I’ve been trying to make it bearable by pretending they are from the Ministry of Magic and are searching for clues to horcruxes among the lesson plans. Volunteers are not supposed to be observed but I got semi-observed twice. Actually, I was subbing in STD IV and was trying to get the students to quiet down. An MOE rep walked in to see what they hell was going on, saw me, heard my accent, shook her head, and walked away. Creative suffering. Creative suffering. Creative suffering…