You get comfortable with failure when you are a teacher. Not complacent about failing, but comfortable with the reality that each day will include some failure, as well as some success.

Some days your lesson goes perfectly, and the class is wonderfully engaged, and you walk away feeling like they really got it. But then you kick yourself on the way home for forgetting to follow up with a student about a problem that they were having with a peer or at home.

Other days your well-planned lesson falls apart before your eyes when some unanticipated distraction pops up, but you feel like you’ve taken great steps toward building a relationship with a child who has been distant and estranged.

It isn’t a job where you can check things off of a list and feel like you are done -- you are never done. Maybe everyone’s reading level went up, but they always can go higher; you can always do something more to take them there.

In order to maintain sanity you have to accept the feeling of not being done at the end of the day. You have to grow accustomed to the to-do list that generates in your head as you lie down for bed -- a parent that needs to be called, a referral that you have to write, a retest that has to be administered. At the end of the day, you just aren’t ever done.

But that isn’t to say that there aren’t wonderful moments of absolute satisfaction.

This week, the students in my class at I.S. 217, Rafael Hernandez School of Performing Arts in the Bronx, started the "narrative" unit in English class. We had plowed through the units on argument and expository (nonfiction), and had finally arrived at narrative, a unit that always makes me nervous in its lack of structure.

People complain about teaching English because it is so difficult for students to feel successful in reading and writing. Most of my students are at least three years below grade level in reading, and their writing at the beginning of the year strains my eyes. They hate English because they don’t typically know what it is to feel successful in it.

In math, there is a correct answer that they reach, and steps that they have to follow to get to it. In English language arts, there is no such formula.

I try to apply formula in the nonfiction and argument units, teaching them how to craft an essay using steps, trying to make even the most evasive processes concrete. For brainstorming, a number must be assigned to how many ideas that they have to generate, or else there is the danger that they will stop at two. I teach them to create a thesis with subtopics, and to outline a paper following a careful process.

In creating an engaging lead to start the paper, there are exactly four strategies that they must learn in order to do it. Even in creating voice, I provide a clear criteria and instructions for how to use literary devices, and how often I expect to see them used.

They have a checklist, and they self check and peer check and make sure that they haven’t left anything out. In this way, English language arts can feel measurable.

Narrative, writing stories, is harder. In this creative unit, I can’t demand five or six paragraphs, or tell them how to best create an engaging lead using a formula.

I teach them about character development, and plot -- suspense and foreshadowing. I read examples with them, and I give them suggestions, but it’s the first time all year that my students are expected to be creative and free with their writing.

It terrifies me. I worry that they will waste 20 minutes trying to come up with a topic, and get stuck every few minutes trying to think of what to write next. These are failures that I have encountered in the past.

But last week, English class was a great success. Although I tried to support them with organizers, magazine pictures to spark their imagination and process steps to guide them, there was only so much I could do. It really came down to their imaginations and innovations. And they showed me that sometimes, they don’t need me as much as I think they do.

This week, with the parameters of concrete structure and strict writing guidelines taken away, my students felt as if they couldn’t fail. They couldn’t misstep or do something wrong, and some of my students who have struggled and been reluctant writers all year dedicated themselves to the project with unexpected enthusiasm, spending their lunch periods and their time after school at the computer, typing their final drafts.

At the end of each page, one boy would hit print and demand that his writing be read aloud immediately, garnering lots of laughs from his peers, before rededicating himself to the project.

Another student pinned his paper to the bulletin board before anyone had the chance to grade it, so eager was he to have his work shared.

This week felt like a success in some important ways. Students thrived, revealing themselves in the choices that they made, and showing me what they were capable of when left to their own devices and their own definitions of success.

Still, there were a hundred moments when I felt like I was failing, not doing enough, not doing it right. Sprinkled in with any success is always doubt about what I could have done better, and where we are heading in the long run.

I keep a yellow folder in my desk from year to year. It contains about 60 papers from each year that I have taught: 30 papers from the first week of each year, when they create their first writing sample, and 30 from June, when they create their last.

The growth evident in these samples makes me glow -- seeing a child evolve from a point where they wrote papers with no punctuation or paragraphs, no sense of direction, to a point where they can organize their thoughts enough to convey them effectively. They have learned to communicate -- a skill that, once mastered, they will always have.

This folder reminds me that you can’t measure your success in the day to day. There will be no day without failure. Sometimes, you will get to the end of the year, and there will still be some failure when you look back.

But you can measure growth when you look at the big picture -- from Day 1 to Day 180 -- and realize that small failures are inevitable on the road to success.