Here I am, still alive at the end of my first year of teaching! Shortly after my last post, life got rather crazy. At the beginning of April, right after Easter, my grandma on my mom’s side, Helen Engevik, died suddenly in the nursing home in Sisseton. I mention that it was right after Easter because I can’t imagine a better time to go home and be with Jesus. Grandma had been pretty healthy most of her life and never lost any of her mental capacity. We never exactly found out what caused her death, but I had so much peace knowing that she was with my grandpa and her two babies that she had lost, as well as her older sister who had just died weeks before. My sister Marretta and I sang “It Is Well With My Soul” at her funeral, and we didn’t cry too much. I did better while we were singing than I did while I was speaking beforehand. Besides the fact that Julia and Michael both couldn’t be there, the funeral was beautiful. Many people in Eagle Butte seem to look at death so differently, even Christians, so being at a funeral where there was so much hope was refreshing. So far in my life, I have never felt more sure of God’s presence than during times of sadness. I know that the comfort He gives is nothing that the world or my own imagination could come up with. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted. Praise God.
You can imagine the reason why life continued to get more stressful after that, given the season we were in. About that time we really started to push seniors to get work done in preparation for graduation, and those who were still working on a class from freshman or sophomore year started to panic a bit. I was always a bit of a procrastinator as a student, so I can sometimes relate to my students, but many of them pushed procrastination to a limit that I didn’t even know existed. Nevertheless, we had a month left before graduation, and at that point I’d say I had one student scooting to the end of his freshman exercises with junior and senior English work barely started, probably five kids who had the majority of junior and senior English to do, and two who had senior English and the fine arts requirement left. Those were just the classes they had for me—many of them also had some math and two or three textbooks in progress for social studies. At that point two of the girls decided they wouldn’t be able to pull it off, and another quit about a week later when she moved down to Pierre with her boyfriend and enrolled in a GED program. Everyone else, about twenty-four seniors, kept plugging away, and to my consternation, many of them kept up their routines of randomly skipping school just because they didn’t feel like coming in. Most frustrating to me was that my two advisees, two of the brightest seniors, acted as though they were trying not to graduate, either by skipping or by playing solitaire all afternoon. I really didn’t know what would happen, but older teachers assured me that we would graduate the vast majority of them, because they themselves would kick into higher gear the closer graduation got, and we would all work hard enough to help them.
Seniors kind of took over my life for that month, and I apologized to many underclassmen for any neglect I felt I was displaying. Because of the urgency, seniors’ essays got graded first and I would sometimes focus more of my attention on them. The ethics of that really nagged at me, because most of our seniors who really needed the help were those who had refused to work or accept help earlier in the year. One thing that I learned from my first year at the EAGLE Center was to push the seniors much harder during fall semester, though I may not be very successful and may just get a bunch of crabby students. Maybe I can bring in one of this year’s seniors to talk to their successors about the pain they will avoid if they front-load their work. Being on an independent study program has its challenges, as I have learned from being homeschooled and taking online classes.
Despite the overwhelming need I felt to help seniors, many of my other students made great achievements during that last month. One of my sophomore/juniors worked to finish all his junior English, and though he has quite a bit of old math and science left to do, I really think he can graduate next year if he stays in the groove he got going this past semester. All of my seventh grade girls finished their book reports, though they didn’t have a lot of time to spare, and one of my freshman/sophomores quietly finished half of his freshman English, which I had not really expected. He recently told me that English has become his favorite class this semester, and believe me, I am not about to let him forget that he said that! On the other hand, one of my juniors handed in a question packet for a novel that was copied word-for-word from one of the seniors, even though from talking with him I know that he read and understood the book! He didn’t even copy the corrections that I had made on the senior’s packet, which I told the other teachers was either supreme laziness or the weirdest form of honesty I had ever encountered. : )
One of my favorite stories from this whole first year of teaching involved another one of my juniors. He lives with a woman who works for the school, and though he is quite intelligent, he has somehow convinced her that he cannot write, to the point that she will write his essays for him. Other teachers asked me if I knew for sure that she had and whether or not I had reported it to the principal, and I responded that yes, I knew for sure, and that I didn’t have the heart to report a writer who had honesty to tell me about “When I was a little girl.” I got a good laugh out of that one, and that student will be starting that essay over this fall.
One bright spot for me at the beginning of May was prom. I was told that as the youngest teacher at the EAGLE Center I was stuck chaperoning post-prom, and I had to take pictures at Grand March for yearbook, so I thought the best plan would be to go to Grand March, go home for supper and a nap, and then head straight to the Upper Elementary gym for post-prom. How do you think that worked out? : ) Well, I went to Grand March, then I went to the gym to take some group pictures and check out the party, then I stayed for supper, then I danced, then I danced some more, then I took more pictures, then I danced some more… then I went home to change for post-prom. I was pretty zoned out at post-prom, but not too much to beat one of my students on the obstacle course and get a whole ton of grading done. That’s right! What kind of teacher enjoys prom? Probably one who never went to prom in high school!
Crunch time really was the last full week of school, when we still had about eight students who had not yet completed all their work. Once our students complete all their work, they can exit the EAGLE Center after having a mock job interview and getting each teacher to sign that their work is done. On Monday we took inventory and reminded each senior what he or she had left. I asked one of the guys what his plan was to get it all done, and he said, “Well, I haven’t thought about it too much, because I’m trying not to get too overwhelmed.” He is a very relaxed kid, and a very likable one that could have been done weeks earlier if he had not been absent so much. On Tuesday I bluntly told one student that if he didn’t turn in at least four drafts of essays to me that day he wouldn’t be able to graduate, and though the two of us had to stay two hours late that day, he got them done! The students who had a lot of English left had an especially hard time, because I was going out of town on Friday to attend my sister’s graduation in the Twin Cities, which meant they had to finish all their English work by Thursday. They were supposed to finish everything by Friday at 1:00 or so anyway, though.
One very exciting thing that happened that week was that we finished our EAGLE Center yearbook, the first that had ever been published for just our school. I would never have been able to do it without a few of the seniors, particularly one who had finished all of her work and started helping me while she brought her attendance up to the NCLB-mandated 94%. After she made up her attendance she kept finding time to come help between her Dairy Queen shifts, and she was such an encouragement to me. The yearbook definitely could not have gotten done without her! Let me know if you would like to see it—I can send a pdf to anyone who wants to check it out!
We had our awards day on Thursday, which was terrible timing for a few students who were right under the gun. It was fun, though—I rather enjoyed it. One of my favorite seniors, who had decided to quit and taken off in a huff just the previous week, finished his last assignment right before lunch, and then right after lunch his very relieved mother came to the awards ceremony. One of my brilliant advisees was furiously working on his current events class right before lunch, and then wrote his résumé with me right after lunch as the awards were getting set up. I had sat with him at lunch and tried to figure out how he was going to finish, since he still had three books left for social studies, and we had come to the conclusion that he would need to stay up all night and read through his shift at the gas station. Then as soon as we printed off his résumé, the ceremony started, and even though he got several awards, I could just see him wilt the longer the ceremony got. I finally couldn’t take it anymore, and passed off my job as school photographer in order to take the poor guy over to my computer room so that he could get some current events done before he had to leave for work. I really didn’t know if he had enough desire to stay awake all night, but I said many prayers for him that night, and subsequently didn’t get that much sleep myself! My student who had written four essay drafts on Tuesday finished his final draft for his senior research essay at about 5:30 that evening, and I’d never seen anyone so excited to graduate! He kept saying, “Oh, Miss Osthus, I’m graduating!”
I stayed up late that night grading a handful of essays that couldn’t wait, and then packed and tossed and turned, wondering if any of my students were still awake studying. Early the next morning I left, having no clue what would happen with the three students we had yet to exit, two of whom were my highly intelligent advisees. My sister’s graduation and party were wonderful, and I was so proud of her, my baby sister. However, part of my heart was still in Eagle Butte, so I left her party at 5:00 PM on Saturday so that I could be at C-EB’s graduation at 1:00 on Sunday. The drive was uneventful until I got pulled over for sleepily drifting over the median right outside of Eagle Butte, and as soon as the tribal officer was convinced I wasn’t drunk he sent me home to bed.
Right after church on Sunday I drove to school and looked for new memos, and was overcome with delight when I found that every one of the students who had been working that week had finished! I spent the next few hours writing on cards and attaching them to the yearbooks that one of the juniors had assembled while I was gone. Graduation was fantastic. I knew that everything I had done was worth it when I saw how excited they all were to graduate. I wonder about the ethics of the ridiculous sacrifices I made a few times for those seniors (mostly sleep!), but those questions didn’t cross my mind when I was actually at graduation. At least a few of our seniors were first generation high school graduates, which is an amazing experience. Most of our students had actually worked really hard for their accomplishments, even though some of them should have started working several years sooner. Two of our girls were graduating a year early, and at least four students were graduating a year late and had barely expected to graduate at all. My heart was so full, and when I hung out with Amanda and Nicky that night I couldn’t contain the contented sighs that occasionally slipped from me. They probably thought I was crazy. I really think I am… at least crazy about my Master who planted me here to love these students, and about these students that I’ve been given to love.
After that we had three days left with underclassmen, but very few of them came in. Then we had two days full of shredding, cleaning, and meetings, and I checked out Friday morning and headed out for my week off with my family in Minnesota. There was a fall and there was spring, my first year of teaching! Uff da! I’ll fill you all in on my summer in Eagle Butte later! Love, Christina
