Mantras and Smart Asians

Mood: tired

I've been exhausted lately.  After a week packed with up hills and down hills, I almost feel relieved its the weekend. Almost because I know how much work I have to do.

Fridays are days actually spent on the UCLA campus.  Today I made an incredibly arduous trek around the entire campus while carrying a million things.  This was all in pursuit of signing up and attending a yoga class. But in the end, i suppose it was all worth it.  I feel slightly less tense.

During methods, one of the people in my cohort did a presentation on time management.  It was fantastic! We did an activity where while being time, we write the words "multitasking is worse than a lie" and then we write 1,2,3,...all the way until 27.  Then we were to do the same task again except this time we had to alternate between ever letter and number we wrote. so something like this: m1u2l3t4i5t6a7....etc.  We figured out that multitasking is actually in most cases incredibly ineffective.  It took almost twice as long to do the second task and mistakes were more easily made.  What an interesting and true theory!

He then talked about gathering points: places where information is gathered for example planners, calenders, voicemail, e-mail.  I think the thing that struck home the most for me is that my brain should NOT be used as a gathering point.  That's what I do too much.  I wonder if perhaps this is why I unknowingly stress too much.  I tend to think about things over and over again during the day like: "i gotta finish this this and this today, i gotta finish this this and this today" or "today i must go to the gym, today i must go to the gym, today i must go...." or "don't get sick don't get sick don't get sick." This never ending mantra of tasks repeating endlessly in my brain could be the source of all my problems! No wonder I'm getting sick all the time. Vicky's brain! Calm Down.

blargh.

The other class I had today has a very emo atmosphere about it.  It's an identity class where loaded questions are constantly unpacked. Today was no exception.  We did an activity where we discussed some of our own high school experiences.  It helped me (as well as many others in my cohort) remember what it was like in high school.  I remembered the good stuff, but probably more so the bad stuff.

I had mainly two groups of friends in high school.  One group is the group i still keep in touch today.  I call them my circle friends because we like to stand in a circle whenever we congregate.  More importantly, they were the group I became close with, ate lunch with, and enjoyed spending time with.  The other group is my friends from in my classes.  I call them the Smart Asian group because well....it consists of smart Asians. I never connected deeply with this group and consequently, our relationship was not long-lasting.  But they were my friends nonetheless.

In 10th grade, I blindly mimicked my Asian counterparts and signed up for 3 AP classes.  I think 10th grade was a very defining year of my life.  I fought the most with my parents then.  I struggled in school the most then and I was still recuperating from my brother's death.  So one story I shared today with some people in my cohort was the way I felt a lot of times in one of my three AP classes.

Mr. Halander taught AP Chemistry and he had just finished lecturing about the days notes.  Sadly, all of the content he spewed had gone completely over my head. He let us loose and said that it was our time now to finish our lab and do our homework.  All of my friends immediately began getting to work.  I sat around trying to look busy but was really just scribbling some numbers around.

I felt inferior, out of place and above all, stupid.

Why was it that everyone else understood everything so clearly and got the material so fast? Why could I not learn like they did?  Similar to the the mantras that are wrapped tightly around me today, I had this one playing in my head that entire year: "inferior! stupid! inferior! stupid!"  The worst part was that I was embarrassed in front of my Smart Asian friends and embarrassed in front of the teacher.  I remember taking the exams and fearing the day Mr. Halander finished grading and passed the tests back.  I remember seeing slash marks throughout my entire paper and a dismal failing grade sprawled across the top of the page.  And then I remember calmly folding the paper in half strategically so that the grade wouldn't show and then stowing it away into my bag.  The questions from the Smart Asians would soon follow.  "How did you do on the test?" "You at least passed right?"  I so badly wanted to show off just a passing grade.  Instead I shook my head, plastered on a comical sad face and said "it was no good."

I don't think I've ever felt lower than that year in that class.  I actually believed that I could have possibly had a learning disability.  All these things resurfaced today in class.  I suddenly remembered the emotions and the instability I went through when I was in high school.  Then I realized that my student right now are going through the same.

Mr. Halander was not a terrible teacher.  Many students really liked him.  It's unfortunate that I felt so insecure about myself in an AP class. It might also sound snobby that I felt incapable of achievement in such a notoriously difficult class. But the feeling and effects were very real and something I still remember today.  I can only imagine how some of my Algebra 1 students feel. It's hard to reflect on all of these things but it's a work in progress.    

As I'm discovering my own teacher identity right now, I'm finally understanding the dilemmas teachers go through.  I was not stupid or disabled in 10th grade.  I simply sucked at paying attention to lectures (still do), which was how Mr. Halander always conducted his classes.  I didn't learn the way he taught but then again, not everyone did.  Mr. H taught his class in a way that reached MOST of the students in the class.  But students like me were left behind in the dust.  I don't blame him.  Now that I'm in the teacher shoes, I sometimes feel like doing that myself.  It's difficult and a lot of work to differentiate lessons to address all the different learning habits, backgrounds and achievement levels in the class.  But at the end of the day, I hope that I will still try my best to reach every students learning need in my classroom.