Yesterday was a half day at school. It was not a good day, even though it was a half day. The shortened versions of events: My bitchest, brattiest student went over my head to the Head Principal in order to get her way. In his approval of her request, he undermined my authority in my own classroom. The man does not even know my name and now I’m left to handle what he destroyed. Yes, that is an exaggeration. The graffiti word “Puta” on the outside of my portable however, is not an exaggeration. I’m going to try and make a joke out of it, but it did hurt the first day. (For those of you don’t speak Spanish, like me, Puta means bitch).
But the story isn’t about my misfortunes on Tuesday. It is about a metaphor involving a bee. I get a lot of bees in my classroom for some reason. In front of my kids, I show no fear. But when I’m sitting grading, I get a little nervous. I am allergic after all. I was avoiding a bee by my desk the other day. It actually wasn’t flying around my room, just flying and running into a window. It was determined to get outside through that window. The bee kept trying different routes, but always hitting the window. It made me think about TFA. We work so hard to reach this goal of student achievement, but we keep running into this invisible wall, a.k.a The Achievement Gap. Unfortunately, we don’t know any another method, so we keep trying that same window. Maybe some day we will find the door.