Self - Doubt and Questioning

Despite the title of this post, I am not questioning my career choice. I love teaching and I love seeing my students every day. A student told me that they have never had a teacher care or take an interest in their well-being before like I do, and that just made me feel great. I am doing my best to show every student I care about them and that their success is my top priority.

This being said, I still struggle with feeling like I'm teaching anything. We have two weeks left of school before our three week break, and I'm wondering if I'm teaching my students anything. I feel like my ninth graders are learning something, mainly the parts of speech. I've also seen that they are starting to understand our weekly poems better. I have more participation in those discussions. They also all seemed to enjoy the nonfiction unit (though next time it will be much shorter!) and liked what I chose for them to read. Now we're looking at Anthem and I'm going to be able to talk about literary terms with them. My ninth graders have me feeling okay about what I'm doing. Then I look at my tenth graders.

We have had three test grades so far, and I'm wondering if I'm really teaching them. We've read a Greek play and talked about the origins of tragedy. But I feel like there is no growth going on. And maybe I'm just being crazy, but I do feel like I'm not teaching them anything. Right now we're looking at Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, and I've mainly been going over the plot with them. However, they have been struggling to understand Shakespeare, so I have to. But I don't want them to leave my class and have learned nothing. I hear about and see all these amazing lessons that others are doing, and I feel like mine are lacking. I am hoping that this upcoming break will give me time to sit down and really pound out some amazing lessons. I don't want to look back and be like "yea, my first year of teaching I really didn't make a big impact on my students' learning. But that's ok, I was still learning." I want to look back and be like "I made some mistakes, but in the end my students learned and grew."

It's only been seven weeks in the classroom, but already I'm wondering if I'm really doing enough.