Despairing Idealizm

I guess I've been cursed with good teachers. Teachers who managed to inspire their students to do the homework and come to class [mostly] prepared. Teachers who taught whatever the hell they wanted without regard to the administration. Teachers who shunned worksheets, and teachers who taught more than mere themes - teachers who taught life. Teachers who pursued and expected Excellence.

Add to that Jim Burke's books, as well as Rafe Esquith's tendency toward tenacious, and you can probably approximate my outlook for life with one word: Idealistic.

Enter good friend and recent graduate: the First-Year Teacher. She had the same types of classes and teachers. She read some of the same books. And she's tanking. Well, not exactly. From what I can tell, she's doing a fantastic job, but she's painting a vastly different picture for me: bad attitudes, poor readers, students who come to class wholly unprepared, and a 16% pass rate for pop quizzes.

"I can finally appreciate worksheets," she says. "I hate, hate, HATE them, but I get it now. At least they get the kids into the text, answering questions. Because otherwise..." her voice trails off with a note of defeat. It's the third week of school.

How? HOW? How do teachers achieve anything, against such odds? How did my teachers do it? Is it all an illusion? Are Burke and Esquith and all those other good teachers anomalies? Well, I know they are, based on the number of bad teachers I've also had. But HOW? How do you face a class of apathy and eventually change the world? Oh, and, while we're at it, let's add PASS standards and NCLB to the equation. And yet, they manage to do it all. Obviously, they're not first-year teachers.

Great. How do you handle the first year, without being a 'first-year'?

How do you hold a problem in your hands?