Then …

This is a quick overview of the first (of many) lessons that I learned when I first began my career almost 20 years ago.

May, 2003, I was so happy to finally be graduating! I had wanted to be a teacher as long as I could remember – yes, I was one of those crazy kids who played school with my dolls and Barbie’s. I remember walking across the stage and saying to myself, “Yep! I did it. Today is really the first day of the rest of my life.” Of course, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I did graduate from the College of Education, so of course, I knew what it meant to be a teacher. It was going to be my duty to inspire my students to be forward thinkers who can change the world, and I was up for the challenge. Shortly after graduation I secured a position as a 6th grade English Language Arts teacher in the neighboring public school district. What I didn’t know was that getting the job as the teacher was just the beginning of many obstacles I would have to face throughout the years.

My first year of teaching was rough. I had a lot of ideas that I was ill-prepared to implement. I was unaware of a lot of compliance that I was responsible for, e.g. not just weekly lesson plans, but quarterly and semester syllabi, a classroom website, meeting after meeting! It didn’t help that I believed that all of my students had potential to be great, but then I learned that was not common practice.

In middle school, teams come together and plan. Each team includes the 4 main content teachers, Math, English Language Arts, Science and Social Studies. Each team shares the majority of the students. (Come to find out later that I didn’t “share” the ESOL students with the team – but that’s a story for later). Each team was expected to meet once per week to discuss communication from administration, as delivered through the team lead, and any student concerns. At my first team meeting, I learned just how naïve I was. I remember going into the Math Teacher’s classroom first thing in the morning. I was just getting to know the students, so I had not discovered any issues that I wasn’t capable of handling. Once the team lead was done with the housekeeping portion of the meeting, which was just delivering the updates from administration, she asked me where my list was. Of course, I didn’t know what “list” she was referring to, so I asked. Her response, “Well, the list of students we need to give referrals to so they will be gone by Christmas.” I was mortified! I couldn’t believe that they had already made judgments, and poor ones at that, about my students.

At that point, I swore to myself that I would never turn into one of them. I paid very close attention to the names they were discussing. I made it my mission to do everything I could to make sure my students knew I cared and believed in them. And you know what? We only lost one by Christmas and sadly, that was beyond my control. We had one student, a victim of bullying, who decided he would circulate a list of students and teachers he wanted to harm. Does it surprise you to know that I was NOT on that list but the rest of the teachers on my team were?