Early in my teaching career, when I was still wet behind the ears and still developing my professional confidence, I lost sleep at night from thinking too much about the one or two problem students who just didn’t “get it.”
You can imagine the kind of kid I’m referring to. The kid whose main means of getting attention was through disrupting the class. The kid who loved talking out of turn, not turning in his homework, or walking in late. The kid who told me to my face how much he hated English and school and anything to do with learning.
Instead of focusing my energy on the 99% of students who DID get it, I drove myself crazy trying to figure out ways to somehow bring that 1% into the fold. Of somehow changing that disruptive kid into a young adult who valued learning, the school community — and most of all, himself.
As time went on and I gained insights and experience about myself, about people, about the educational system, I learned to not worry so much about kids who weren’t on the same page as the rest or who had it out for the world no matter what. Nothing was going to change that. Least of all me exerting an extra 50% effort just to reach the unreachable.
What I changed was how I looked at myself, how I valued myself as a professional, as someone who was competent in my role and confident about the service I delivered each and every day, knowing I was making a difference in a lot of lives. I stopped investing my most precious resource into a losing cause and while I can’t say that I never lost sleep again from that point on, I did have far fewer restless nights.
It’s inevitable that each of us will face a time marked by the one that got away — the one client, the one project, the one mate we believed with every ounce of our being was THE one and only. But just like great fishing stories are built around the one that got away, so too are great teaching stories focused on the kids who drove us crazy. Even better, though, are the stories about the time we landed the big one — the project, the client, the mate — brought it back to the dock, and put into the record books a catch to beat all catches.
