Lessons in Transit

[Revised and Updated: 6/25/13]

A teacher’s life is one that is constantly in transition. We transition from lesson to lesson, period to period, unit to unit, year to year. We transition from one (new, life-changing, time-saving, field-innovating) program to another similarly "innovative" program. We transition from one classroom to another, one team to another, one grade to another.

This May, I left the school where I began my teaching career, where I’ve been working, teaching, learning, and sweating, crying, and sometimes practically living for the past four years. This July, I’ll be starting at a new school downtown. I am excited, but also a little nervous. My new position and new school will present me with many new challenges, and I look forward to the opportunities I’ll have in the coming year (and beyond, hopefully!). But it’s important to me that I take with me the lessons I learned at my last school into this new one.

Here are just a few of the things I’d like to remind myself:

1. Keep everything --but do it electronically!

My natural tendency to be a packrat is incredibly frustrating to most people who have ever had to live with me. Ask my parents, my sister, my college roommates--even my dog expresses his displeasure with the cardboard boxes I have stacked in my room by gnawing holes on their corners. I save clothing receipts (in case I need to return something), ticket stubs (for the memories), magazines (so I can make that recipe for lemon cheesecake one day), even slightly holey articles of clothing (because I am definitely going to mend that tear someday soon and it will be as good as new, seriously). I realize that this is generally unhealthy in my regular life, but it is a bad habit that has served me well as a teacher. I spent my first four years as a teacher avidly collecting anything and everything I could: lesson plans, worksheets, books, classroom supplies, even furniture! I begged my colleagues to email me copies of their worksheets and PowerPoint presentations, braved the vast wilds of the Internet to search for and save other teachers' lesson ideas, scanned copies of students’ projects to use as models. The last four years have taught me that even if I am teaching American Literature this particular year, I never know when this lesson on A Midsummer Night’s Dream will come in handy later on, or that peer review checklist, or these MLA formatting handouts. After a year or two of stuffing filing cabinets full of worksheets, I now know that electronic is infinitely more organized (and space-saving and clutter-minimizing) than paper, but this collecting habit of mine has saved me more than once on days when I had some unexpected extra time at the end of class or needed emergency plans for a colleague with a sick child or even when I (shhh—don’t tell!) forgot to plan a lesson for that day.

2. Share freely and ask without shame.

One of my most persistent and worrying fears in life is being a burden or inconvenience to other people. I am tempted at times to attribute this to my upbringing by two hard-working immigrant parents who taught me that I should never ask another person for anything that I was capable of doing myself. While this attitude has taught me to be self-reliant and fairly capable, it also has made asking for help a challenge throughout most of my life. During my first year, I had one veteran teacher who committed to being my mentor, even before I was brave enough to ask. She regularly updated me on what she was doing, sharing all her materials with me to use as I wished or not, without strings, and she was always available with help when I had specific problems (like the day when I got to school and realized I had left my flash drive at home and I had no lessons with me at all... which may or may not have happened more than once that first year). Almost in spite of myself, I ended up leaning on her heavily for materials and ideas all year, and she was an absolute God-send. Although that first year still felt sometimes like treading water wearing a cement suit and surrounded by hungry sharks, I realize now that she saved me from a lot of first year teacher catastrophes that would have arisen had she left me completely to my own devices. At the same time during my first year, another new teacher and I developed the habit of sending each other drafts of lessons and activities we were working on, even when we were teaching different grades. This not only helped by providing each of us feedback on our work, but gave us practice in looking critically at someone’s work, providing good feedback, and learning how to adapt something for our own use.  When I wasn’t the newest teacher in the department anymore, I made it a point to be as generous with my materials as these women were with me. More than a few times, my colleagues would use something I passed along and provide great feedback on it or adjust it for their own purposes and share it back better than before. Sometimes they would even just reply back with a file or link to what they’d been using instead. Eventually, I began to realize that whether the other teachers actually used what I shared didn’t matter so much as creating and maintaining the habit and culture of sharing. Collaboration—that highly-valued educational buzzword—didn’t have to be as time-consuming or formal as I had previously thought.

3. Take a real lunch break.

Despite the inherently social nature of it, teaching can be such an isolating activity. Sometimes I fear that a zombie apocalypse could begin sweeping the nation on Tuesday morning, and I wouldn't know it until 2:05 when I finally get a chance to sit down at my desk and check my email. That's why taking a break in the middle of the day has become so, so important to me. Part of the culture of my department was that most of us ate lunch together in the teachers’ lounge every day. I know it isn’t the same at a lot of schools. I’ve actually even been told by some veteran teachers I know from other schools to avoid the teachers’ lounge at all cost. I know they were well-meaning, and every school culture is different, but for me, taking that short break to talk to real live adults in the middle of my day was absolutely critical for my sanity. At times, teaching is a lonely profession, and that time to share stories, troubleshoot problems, think through lessons, and yes, vent our frustrations was incredibly valuable for me. Having those 30 minutes to talk to my colleagues every day, even if it was just about last night’s episode of American Idol, reminded me that I was not alone in this sometimes scary and exhausting endeavor we undertook every day. On days when I didn't feel like making the walk to the lounge, sitting at my desk in a quiet classroom with my lunch and the day's headlines (or the day's celebrity gossip, depending on my mood) on my web browser could be just as refreshing, another simple reminder that there IS indeed a world outside my classroom. Taking a lunch break, with coworkers or by myself, helped me to feel less like I was stranded on a deserted island of books and papers and red ink pens.

4. Keep the door open after school.

I am an introvert. (Once in a while I ponder how I came to choose a profession that quite literally requires me to be surrounded by at least 30 people all day long and I consider bashing my head in with a rock.) Some days after school, I am so exhausted of people that all I want to do is lock the door, close the blinds and pretend no one is home for a good 60 minutes. Some days, I actually do this. Most days, I resist the temptation. Some of the best conversations (personal and professional) that I’ve had with other teachers and students have been during unexpected moments in passing after school. An open door says, “Hey! I’m here! Say hello!” and helps to build community. I wonder how many wonderful conversations I would have missed, how many collaborative moments I would have never experienced, if someone hadn’t popped their head into my classroom to say hello or I hadn’t gotten up from my desk to see what the commotion was happening down the hall. Keeping my door open was an easy, visible reminder to myself and others that I was available and part of the community in my hallway and in my school.

5. Find at least one way to interact with students outside of class regularly.

One abrupt realization I had at the end of my first year of teaching was that the students who had become my daily companions for the past year, whom I had read poetry to, written essays with, lectured about the Transcendentalists, listened to discussing Plato, nagged about deadlines, even yelled at in frustration and cried over on my drive home, these students were mine no longer. Even if I saw them in the hallways or in the cafeteria or at a football game, I would never be their teacher and they would never be my students in exactly that same way again. That one year suddenly became far, far more precious. What a brief window of time where my life and their lives intersected! After my first year, I was asked, with one of my fellow newly-minted second year teachers, to sponsor our school’s National Honor Society. In a school as large as ours, NHS is a massive undertaking, with over 150-200 students in any given year spanning up to three grades. Although it was a lot of work and my co-sponsor and I felt at times that we were just making things up as we went along and praying no one would reveal us as frauds, sponsoring NHS gave me the opportunity to build relationships with my students that lasted more than just a year in my classroom (or even a semester, in our case, with our school’s crazy course scheduling). What incredible pieces of my students’ lives I would have missed if I only ever saw them for two hours at a time only three times a week! I would never have known that Aleyna loved animals and volunteered at the county animal shelter or that Dylan devoted hundreds of hours every summer to teaching seven-year-olds how to play soccer. Just as my students forget that teachers have lives outside their classroom walls, I think sometimes I forget that my students have lives beyond my classroom, too. NHS was an excellent way for me to see them outside of our “normal” context. The other thing I tried to do was to commit to attend my students’ music and art concerts (and yes, sometimes their sporting events, too). Many of my students were involved in theatre, dance, band, and choir, and it never ceased to surprise me how appreciative they were when I came to see them. I think they, just like all of us, like to be recognized for doing what they love, and I often learned new ways to appreciate my students that I hadn’t known before. Yes, Maria was quiet in class discussions and turned red in the face whenever she was called on to answer, but I saw her sing and dance in the spring musical, and she saw me in the audience, and after that night, she smiled and greeted me when I saw her every morning. That smile felt like a victory to me.

As I look back over this list, I recognize that I could never fit all the lessons I learned during my first four years into a neatly numbered list, even if I let myself continue on until I reached one hundred or even one thousand. I've probably forgotten more of those lessons than I could remember to record. What I do know is how important it is for me to keep reflecting and writing and learning, no matter how many more years I teach. Because I have many more transitions ahead of me. And I'll take those new lessons with me when I go.