Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Ceremony

I spent the weekend coming up with awards. Little things I've noticed about our students, not all of them academic, not all of them all that great, but all of them phrased in as positive a way as I could. I enlisted the help of the other teachers for the ones I couldn't invent myself. Finally I got them all together, typed them into the computer. Youngster put them on fancy paper and made them look official.

We pulled the kids into a circle. Forty-four faces awaited their awards, some of them we've known all year, an unfortunate rarity in our school, which is on a block schedule so most classes only last a semester. I even typed up awards for the teachers, so everyone was included.

We announced the awards. Kids get excited for this kind of thing, even though they are supposed to be too old to be thrilled by a little piece of paper. It's the details they like. The somebody-noticed-me-in-this-great-big-school effect. Kids we never see smile, smiled when they heard their description tied to their name. Heck, the grown-up para got excited when she got hers.

So it was nice. It was perfect, up until it was all over, and some of the kids said, "Hey, what about XXX", the quietest kid in the room. The kid who likes to answer questions with as non-commital a grunt as he can. He didn't have an award. On the spot, I couldn't do it. My well had run dry. I could think of nothing to say. I didn't have one for him. Either his name got skipped or the award got lost, but the quietest, most invisible, kid got nothing on the day that was supposed to be about noticing every single one of them. Damn.

I thought this thing was going to get me into teacher heaven, but it turns out I'm going to Hell after all.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I know exactly how you feel. It's one of the worst feelings in the world. Don't forget that it was just a mistake. Keep your head up and remember that we all make mistakes. Most of us, on the other hand, don't try half as hard as you do to make others feel good.

Alex said...

Hey, thanks, for the kind words. I decided that a kid who tries that hard to be invisible might be OK with missing his award, and I also pulled him out in the hallway today to tell him what his award was supposed to be, and he looked ready for me to stop talking to him as soon as I started. So, it's over. It's OK. We all survived. And, the most important thing is that now it's summer vacation...