Embrace: The Number
I haven’t written very much this summer because I have been busy traveling the world with my favorite adventurer-my daughter. She and I have just finished a whirlwind tour of Europe, and I am looking forward to writing about that soon. However, I have something else on my heart today. This morning, as I was coming home from the gym I got a text from a very sweet student, excited over her success on the AP exam (I am humbled and honored to teach AP Language and Composition). I was very proud of her. I knew scores came out today, and I was eager to get home to look at them. I made a cup of coffee and sat down at my computer, took a deep breath, and logged in to the system to see my students’ scores. Immediately I scrolled through the results, thinking about what these numbers mean as a reflection of a year of teaching. Would these numbers give me permission to be proud of the work we did in my classroom this year, or would it make me feel ashamed and like a failure? And that’