Well, it’s summertime, and the living is easy (sort of). One of the most beautiful things about the teaching profession is that, no matter how terrible a year you have, you have something to look forward to—a time to reflect, recalibrate, and recover.  As you may have surmised from my past emails, that opportunity was much needed after this past year.

The last update I sent was April 16—the day I started crying following Ravi’s successful rebellion against my bathroom policy (or “B Day”, for short). Now, following this dark incident, there were a few bright spots that dappled the last months of the year. The first of these was the surprising outpouring of support that students showed me immediately following B Day. I received over a dozen encouraging notes, apologizing on behalf of their classmates (since the students sending the notes were almost never the ones who had anything personally to apologize for), offering encouraging messages, and even offering some words of affirmation, albeit usually qualified (e.g. “I know you’ve had a rough year and you’ve struggled a lot, but you did an okay job for a first-year teacher). By far, however, the note that most took me aback was written by a student who had (as far as I could tell) divided her time in my class between sleeping, being on her cell phone, and engaging in off-topic conversations with her friends, and certainly did not appear to be particularly inspired by my attempts at teaching Spanish grammar. She addressed her note to “The most AMAZING, Compassionate Teacher EVER,” and wrote the kind of note that I think that all teachers dream about getting, saying that I was the kind of teacher that she aspired to be. She ended her note with an exhortation to “not let the actions of a few stop you from being the kind of teacher that students can look up to.” Now, this high praise certainly left me misty-eyed, but it also left me a bit baffled. This student’s final grade in my class was a 0.0, which is actually an impressive feat, given that simply turning in something—anything—for each assignment all but guarantees a passing grade. In spite of my repeated reminders to the class generally, and to her personally, that the end of the year was nigh, and that she and all of the others with failing grades needed to get to work pronto if they wished to pass, the first day that she came to me to make up work was the very last day of class. On the one hand, according to her words, I was an inspiring teacher; on the other, according to her actions, I was not quite inspiring enough to actually do her work. Perhaps the big  lesson here (again) is that I cannot necessarily make any final judgment on my success or impact on students’ lives by the outward appearance of success.

Additional (if  small) victories : after B Day, fifth period (which had caused all the trouble in the first place) improved enormously. I never again had to ask them for their phones in exchange for a bathroom pass, since they always volunteered them. They consistently (if noisily) followed directions and, contrary to all expectations, became a model class. What’s more, one girl in this class (who had been a nightmare in my second period class during the first semester) became a model student (for reasons at which I can only guess), asking intelligent questions, completing and submitting work in a timely fashion (even when she had been absent!) and even helping to tutor classmates when they fell behind.  Now, unfortunately, the improvements of 5^th period did not translate to other periods, and 3^rd period seemingly determined to make up for its gains by growing progressively more nightmarish as the year came to an end, but I will take whatever victories I can have, no matter how small.

My final “victory” was decidedly mixed: after an entire semester of loud complaint that I had assigned more work than could students could possibly complete, a shocking number of failing students discovered previously untapped wells of inspiration and finished an entire semester’s worth of work in the last few weeks (or even the last few days) of school. KJ, for example, had been one of my loudest complainers. She had told me on multiple occasions that it was quite impossible to complete the amount of work that I had assigned, although she could not have made this determination from experience, since she almost never used class time provided for work for its appropriate purpose, made a point of going to the nurse’s office as much as possible, and (as of the seniors’ last week) had not turned in a single assignment since the end of February. When I talked to her about her grade a week or so before the Memorial Day weekend, she told me that she didn’t need this class in order to graduate, and consequently, had decided (with her mom’s blessing) that she would just “chill” in my class for the rest of the year so that she could focus on the “more important” classes that she needed to graduate. (Given the tireless energy and dedication that she devoted to SnapChat, Facebook, and Instagram during these last few weeks, I can only assume that the state of Washington has recently added a social media component to its graduation requirements.) Then, two days before graduation, she came to me in tears and told me that she had discovered that she needed the class in order to graduate after all. Interestingly, she was more respectful in this interaction than in any other that I can recall with her. She dove into her assignments with a vigor and enthusiasm that I did not know she was capable of: while she was not done in time to walk with the class, KJ did manage to complete the entire semester’s “impossible” workload adequately (if not excellently) within the space of two days.

It is hard to say whether I am more impressed or outraged. If KJ (and the other students like her) had put in half the effort to working on her assignments throughout the semester that she had put into avoiding working, or complaining about working, or finding new ways to cheat on their assignments, they would have been near fluent, with much less pain both the them and to me. I am frustrated beyond words with a system that teaches that enables and even encourages laziness and shortcuts by affirming that there is no penalty for failing to do any assigned work; that ends (i.e. test scores) are the only things that matter, and that the means to reach those ends are inconsequential; and that doing the absolute minimum is enough to succeed.

LK is a perfect example of the results of this system in action. He is a very bright student, but devoted his considerable intelligence to figuring out the exact minimum that he needed to pass the class. Then, during the last week of each semester, he would do that (and no more). This freed him up during the other 17 weeks of each semester, he was free to devote himself to more important things, like playing on his cell phone and loudly disrupting the class (and then even more loudly complaining that I was “picking on him” if I asked him to stop). This was, of course, the same student who had candidly told the principal that I teach the students “what we need to know…we just don’t take him seriously” when asked to give the principal an assessment of my teaching performance. I desperately wanted Liam to fail this semester, so that then he could at least learn that actions and attitudes have consequences, since he was hell-bound and determined to learn nothing else in Spanish class. Unfortunately, our particular manifestation of Standards-Based Grading sets the bar so low that I could not deny that he had met them. Now, I know that students attempting to game the system is nothing new or unique; what is unique, however, about our blinkered approach to grading, is that, by making homework, participation, and virtually all the rest of the process by which students actually learn irrelevant to their final grade, we no longer force them to even to through the motions of learning. Granted, an intrinsic motivation (which is what SBG hopes to inspire) is certainly better than an extrinsic one, like working for a grade. However, surely an extrinsic motivation is better than none at all!

My day was an unfortunate microcosm of the whole year. I had given assignments to each period to help clean up the classroom, and I brought snacks with me to bribe students to comply. In each class, even with this attempted bribery, I only got about five students per class who actually helped. There were no tearful farewells and no “Oh Captain! My Captain!” (for any of you who have seen “Dead Poets’ Society”). Generally, my last days of “classes” were filled with bored kids who had mentally checked out at least two weeks previously talking loudly (and often obscenely) about whatever interested them (which was certainly not Spanish) while milling about aimlessly, while listening to loud (and often obscene) music cranked up to a volume where it could be heard throughout the entire class,  and watching the clock carefully so as to spend not a second more than necessary in my classroom. All the while, I, having given up, watched and counted the seconds along with them.

However, after the students were finished, I had one more notable event to deal with. Brianna had made no effort to dissimulate her disdain for me personally, or Spanish class in general. She would walk in with a scowl and ear buds in, go to her seat, and put her head down. When I would encourage her to participate or ask a question, without looking, I would usually respond, “I don’t know,” and refuse to attempt an answer. When I tried to talk to her about her failing grade at the end of the semester, she said that she “just didn’t get” the material, and in any case, if she didn’t know the material, it was my fault because I “didn’t teach.” When I apologized and asked if there was anything more specific I could do to help, she simply reiterated that she “didn’t get it.” Anyway, Brianna was one of those students who, in a heroic fit of uncharacteristic effort, managed to bring her grade up from a 0.3 to almost passing in the space of the last week. When I received the children’s book in Spanish that was their final assignment for the year, I was actually impressed (although a bit confused about the awkward title “El Un Gatito,” which can mean either “The One Little Cat” or “The A Little Cat”). Unfortunately, very quickly, I realized that it was not her work. Out of curiosity, I Googled the “Three Little Pigs in Spanish” , and sure enough, the second or third hit down was word for word the version of “Los Tres Cochinitos” that she had reproduced. The only changes that she had made were to replace the eponymous “three little pigs” with “one little cat” in every instance, and to get rid of the two now superfluous houses made of sticks and straw. I confronted her the next day, and asked if it was her work. She assured me that it was. I asked what resources she had used to write it. She said that she had used Google Translate for a few unfamiliar words, but that was all.  When I showed her and did a side-by-side comparison with the online version she had plagiarized, without changing expressions, she persisted vehemently that she had done no such thing, and that any apparent similitude must be coincidence. After all, she had never claimed that she was not doing an adaption of the Three Little Pigs, and since it was a well-known story, surely that must account for any apparent similarity. She was so persistent in this claim, in fact, that I started to doubt my own judgment. However, coming to, I noted that the probability of randomly finding the exact wording (not simply a few plot points) was infinitesimal, and I informed her that she would get a 0 on the assignment, which consequently meant that she would fail the class. Still not admitting to any wrongdoing, she stormed out. Later that afternoon, as I was cleaning out my cupboards, I got a call from the office that her father was requesting to see me. With a knot in the pit of my stomach and a feeling of grim resignation, I said to send him on down. The perfect end to a perfect year, I thought. A few minutes later, he came down to my classroom, and after hasty introductions, said that his daughter had come out to the crying and saying that she was failing Spanish. He was flabbergasted, because he knew Brianna was an intelligent, high-achieving student, and she had done well in Spanish last year, and even last semester, and if she were struggling (he asked me in an accusing tone), why was this the first time that he was hearing about it? After some explanations about why SBG makes projecting a student’s final grade difficult, and offering some mea culpas about not being more proactive about communication, I showed him the evidence. The obvious conclusion was not lost on him. “So, she plagiarized it,” he said. Relieved that at least he was not disputing the obvious, I hoped that this would be the end of the matter. Then, however, he called Brianna in from the car, and began an hour-long “good-cop/bad-cop” routine that, in retrospect, was almost farcical, in an effort to convince me that she really deserved to pass. He framed himself as an “impartial mediator” between me and her, trying to negotiate some sort of solution whereby “we” could bring her grade up to passing. For her part, when her dad confronted her, Brianna finally did admit to cheating; however, she steadfastly denied any wrongdoing, since “everyone else cheated too” (a disturbingly believable, if mildly exaggerated, claim) and in any case, she felt that she had no choice because I “didn’t teach” the material, and “ignored” her when she asked for help. Finally, however, they gave up on trying to talk me into letting her pass and left.

I think that what is most disturbing about this incident, as well as similar interactions I had had over the course of the year with many other students, was not the fact that so many students cheated, but that so many students possessed the amazing, uncanny ability to stare the facts in the face, resolutely and unblushingly maintain a bald-faced lie with such unblinking conviction that I began to doubt my own sanity or reason, and even to frame my accusation as evidence of a vendetta against them. . This pattern actually makes a lot of sense in light of current events such as Melania Trump’s plagiarized speech at the Republican National Convention—and more importantly, the Trump campaign’s response to it. Following the example of Pilate (the original post-modernist), it seems that we have taken the question, “What is truth?” to be entirely rhetorical. In other words (to be bipartisan), the implicit answer to Bill Clinton’s question about what the meaning of “is” is, is simply “what I want it to be.” The prevalence of this moral relativism seems to me to confirm that Dostoevski was right: without God (or at least some common credo) everything really is permissible; reason alone is powerless against the sheer force of human depravity.

So…now what? Since summer, I have put in applications with Annie Wright School, Lakewood School, Clover Park Prep, as well as the public schools Tacoma, LCover Park, Auburn, Federal Way, and Franklin Pierce districts, as well as putting in an application at Highline Community College. I have also put out inquiries for translation opportunities in local hospitals and the military. So far, I have heard back nothing. This is not surprising, in a way: last summer, I heard nothing at all throughout the entire month of July and then got two job offers in late August. However, this is not to say that it is not discouraging. I feel like I am as highly educated as it is possible to be without having any immediately obvious qualifications for employment. It does not help that the two most obvious skills that I would bring to the table—viz. teaching and Spanish—are both highly dependent on confidence, and after this past year, my confidence is at a low point. It feels like my mind is finally slowing down—like learning languages, or learning anything, is becoming more difficult—like it is no longer easy to think of how I would say something, nor to think of anything worth saying. Mammoth dreams of changing the world are slowly being supplanted with much more moderate aspirations of owning a small house, tending a small vegetable garden, and raising a small brood of children. These are not bad aspirations. Perhaps this is even a step towards wisdom—towards realizing that “only one thing I know: that I know nothing.”