when i'm surrounded

It's still up for revision, but here is my thesis reflection as it stands this evening:

About halfway through this arduous year, I began to wonder what exactly I had gotten myself into. Between EL curriculum piloting, BTSA, lesson-planning, and adjusting to their first classroom, what self-respecting first-year high school teacher decides to conduct teacher research and write a thesis anyway? I used the excuse, “But I like research” whenever anyone asked why I decided to continue into this final year of graduate study, but let’s be honest – that was a bold-faced lie, or at least it was at first. I made it through four years of undergraduate work with what was inside my head, and that alone. I prided myself on being able to think critically and not rely on anyone else’s ideas to inform my academic decision-making. This experience, however, has taught me that I must inform my teaching with the findings of expert practitioners, that everything I have done this year has been supported by research that other people have done – we do not teach in isolation and it would be foolish to try to do so.

I have lived and breathed this research for the past six months and I’m sure my family and friends will be glad to see me finish. They will be proud of me, yes, but they will also be glad to have me back. As a goal-oriented individual, I have lost sleep and a bit of myself in the completion of this thesis. I simply could not let it rest until it was done. Vocabulary squares littered the backseat of my car just as much as the importance of cognates for non-native speakers littered my conversations with everyone from my roommate to my little brother to the barista who makes my latte at Peet’s every Friday morning. I lamented that I had forgotten who I was and what I loved in the wake of this research until I realized that this is who I am and what I love. I have become close to my research because it is meaningful to me and it helps me remember why I became a teacher in the first place.

I love English, but I love my students more and it hurt me to see them struggling. My closeness to my research was borne out of a deeply rooted desire to see my ninth graders succeed in something they thought was impossible. I am proud of myself for making it through this year, but I am even more proud of my students who began making connections to words they had heard in other classrooms and in other languages and who learned how to construct truly meaningful sentences out of words that at first made them say, “This sucks, Miss G!”

I learned that I can do this, whatever “this” might be. For the first time, school was actually hard for me, and I made it through with relatively little incident. Amazingly, this has been the hardest section of the paper to write. How do I conclude a year of academic research? What should my final thought be? I am more exhausted than I was a year ago, but I am also more experienced, more informed, and more ready for whatever comes next. I’ll go against every fiber of teacher-researcher in me when I say that I suppose it’s not necessarily about the outcome at all, but everything that happens along the way.