A child's words

Sometimes my job is so frustrating. Not the kids--I expect kids to be frustrating at times, and those moments are just part of the package. It's the adults that really get me. No one communicates with each other, and the administration is less than administratively gifted. Everyone assumes that I know the ropes, I understand everything about the way the school runs, and I'm just a small cog that will slip quietly into their well-oiled machine. Not so. I'm more like the monkey wrench that got thrown in the works. I've been learning things by trial and error, mostly error, so often, the machine comes to a grinding halt until I can figure out which wheels to grease to get it running again (this has turned into quite the extended metaphor, huh?). Just little things, like where they keep the time cards, what to do if your student is absent, how much different teachers want you to participate with or hang back from the students. Today was especially frustrating because Alex, my kid, was absent, so I subbed for one of the other paras. She has a crazy schedule where she's not with just one student but runs all over the school, doing different things at different places at different times. And she has two lunch duties, which is insane. One of the secretaries told me this lady is kind of crazy, but if she has two lunch duties every day, I don't wonder.

So my morning entailed running around like a chicken with its head cut off--a confused, clueless chicken who kept doing things wrong. It brought up all the issues I've been struggling with lately of feeling "not good enough" and useless and worthless. I went into one of the afternoon classes wanting to cry. But there was no time to cry--the teacher gave me a stack of mini blackboards, a bucket of chalk, and four students ("They're kind of crazy," she warned me) and told me to take them into the hall and practice rounding. So I would write a number on my chalkboard and tell them which place value to round it to. And for some reason, the kids loved it. They threw themselves into it and did a great job. One of the girls, Deanna, had a lot of fun making artistic numbers with swirls and shading with her chalk. Then she said to her friend, "This is fun! She's fun!" Then to me, "Can we do this instead of recess?"

Right there my day turned around. I don't know why a compliment from a child means so much; maybe because they're so completely honest and unjaded. But the fact that I had succeeded in making learning fun for these four struggling kids was a sweet assurance. I still hate feeling like the monkey wrench, but it was a good feeling to know that I could pull the monkey wrench out of the kids' system and get that working smoothly, at least this time.