[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.
