My Teaching Chronicles: Part One

[Author's Note: Before we begin today's entry, this was supposed to be a very different post, but as I started writing, I realized that this needed to be a two-part post about my teaching journey. One for some precursory information about my time post-college, and then another that specifically covers my time at Port Huron. I think I am in a moment where I have to clear out energy of the past to make space for new energy to take over. I feel like a chapter and version of my story is coming to an end, and I want to acknowledge its purpose and importance in my life, but I want to let it go. This feels like a nice way to do that by sharing my story with those who have continued to prove that they love and care about me without conditions. Thank you for being my trusted community.]

I graduated college from Michigan State, where you earn a degree before completing your student teaching. Once you pass your MTTC test to get certified and finish your undergraduate courses, you are able to complete your internship year. During that year, I took graduate level classes on Fridays and worked with a mentor teacher from August until May. The program is designed to be a gradual release, where you start with one class and add one at a time until you have the full course load for a set number of weeks. It is meant to build your confidence as you can complete observation of your mentor and get feedback on your practices by working closely with that person.

For me, it was a terrible year with a terrible mentor, and I felt very uncertain of my teaching abilities because I was given very few opportunities to gain confidence in lesson planning and implementing my learning into practice.

Following that experience, I was offered a job in Sandusky, MI, which for those who don't know, it is small town USA. A corn field in the middle of corn fields. It would have been an hour commute if I wanted to live with my parents or else I would have had to move to a place I had no interest in living. I turned it down much to the chagrin of my father who told me it was a stupid decision.

(For those worried about my father's words, we had a follow up about it after a year, and he told me that when I decided to work two jobs and take a harder path, he knew that I had my reasons for declining the job, and he respected me and that decision. This is a larger conversation about how my dynamic with my dad works. I am able to bring complaints to him about how he has treated me, and he admits when he has messed up. He can take accountability! It is why he is not a lost cause in my crusade of lost causes.)

Instead of accepting that job, I decided to long term sub. The opportunity arose for me to work at the place I did my student teaching in place of my mentor, and I decided to take it. I was able to create the lessons I wanted that were appropriate for the skill of those students and prove to myself that I could work well with the students at that specific school. At the end of my time, I was afforded the opportunity to get validation and redemption from a situation that was a mess during the previous year.

One of the students who I subbed for was the sibling to one I had student taught. On a random day towards the end of my time, I was cleaning the classroom, and he was lingering. The previous day, my brain had connected his last name to the other student's last name, so I asked him if they were related. He shyly looked up at me and said he was. His response was that he knew the incidents from the previous year, and he told me that he knew I wasn't the problem.

To give context, during my student teaching, we read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. We did not do any frontloading about race nor did we have norms for when certain racial words arose (which is like every single page of the book)! In the class that was "mine", a student was reading aloud and kept using the racial slur. Obviously, it was uncomfortable, and I was "in charge" but I was on a tight leash and was nowhere near being in charge. It got to a point where my mentor stepped in and made everyone silent read for the rest of the class period.

The follow-up solution per my mentor was to call the parents of the student who kept saying the word.

She also called the only Black student's parents to tell them of the incident. In that second phone call, she also shared about how that student was performing, and the parent said that there had been many issues that year as a result of me being the teacher. The student had had a wonderful relationship with my mentor and was devastated by the switch, so it was all my fault. Most of their phone call was bashing me and putting me down as a novice teacher who didn't know what I was doing, and I got to listen in without being able to speak up for myself.

I am really not sure how it came about and whose decision it was, but there was a follow-up meeting where that Black student and I had a conversation about what had happened.

At the time, I knew this was a mismanaged situation, and I did not think the decisions being made were right. But in writing this after many years of working with DEI initiatives and learning more about handling conversations/decisions around race, I see that this was a cluster-fuck of terrible decisions. The focus being on the Black student is hella problematic. The one-on-one meeting with that student was hella problematic. I hated it then, and I really hate it now.

In our meeting, that student called me racist, and it was essentially a meeting where I was made to be like "but I am not racist." So disgusting and completely unfair for that student. Clearly the emphasis being on the Black student is completely inappropriate, and the label was deserved to be used. A disservice was done for both of us.

For what it's worth, my mentor teacher orchestrated a lot of things to build herself up with me being a scapegoat for bad teaching. There were other students who treated me disrespectfully and ignored me because they were sad she wasn't their teacher. She wrote notes one day with a student while I was teaching, where it was poor them for me being the lead for that class. She was a 40-something year old women who was incompetent at her job and acting like a teenager. I genuinely don't know how she got approval for being a mentor teacher. Bad judgement on their part.

Getting an opportunity to redo my student teaching experience was needed. By being on my own as the lead teacher, I was able to prove what I was capable of completing without the deadweight of a terrible and incompetent teacher holding me down. I was able to be authentic and had students understand my integrity and character in a way I wasn't given the chance to do the year prior.

I needed that interaction and that experience to gain the confidence in my ability to be a teacher. I know what good teaching is, and I definitely know what it isn't. The year when I student taught was the most horrendous teaching I have ever witnessed and done myself, but it was able to teach me A LOT about what I valued in education and how I wanted to be a teacher.

I deeply hope that I do not actively do harm to students in the way that was done to that student during my student teaching year because harm was done for her, and it was in my hands. However, I am also deeply grateful that I was able to prove that it wasn't my steering that drove us over that edge, and I am glad for that student to be the witness and voice of that.

Once that experience ended, I went to work at Anchor Bay Middle School North, which is where I went to middle school. I had applied to be a sub, but they were smart enough to see a certified teacher apply and put them into a consistent role. I "interviewed" to be a literacy tutor, but it was more of a formality, where they explained what my role would be if I accepted, and I quickly began working with English teachers in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades to help students who were struggling.

At the time, I predominantly worked with Michelle, who taught 6th grade. She let me lead lessons and serve as an active participant in the classroom. I could pull students and work individually, but I was her co-teacher. I worked with two other teachers, and my job was to provide push in support for struggling students. Most of the work was with MTSS, where we had monthly meetings to identified students who were struggling and needed extra support, and then created plans for those various students and their needs.

Eventually, that role turned into a paternity leave position, and I taught research paper writing for 6th graders in a non-fiction class. I also taught creative writing and typing. I know a lot of keyboard shortcuts because of that class!

Once that paternity leave position ended, I was whisked into an 8th grade U.S. history course. Literally, I showed up on the Monday when I was supposed to start being a lit tutor again, and I was pulled into the principal's office and told I was going to be teaching in that role for the remainder of the year. Those children were so rude to me. As the day went on, the students got progressively more rude to me. They yelled at me that I wasn't their teacher and that they didn't want me there. It was fucking brutal. By the end of the day, I had to call the principal down into my classroom to sit because they were so terrible.

Before the end of the year, one of the parents found my teaching portfolio and complained about me to my principal about some of my reflective posts. To throw salt in the wound, that principal, who had been my middle school guidance counselor and volleyball coach, had the audacity to tell me my classroom management needed work.

I am sorry, but when you cover for someone who has no classroom management and didn't require students to complete meaningful work, and you come in for April and May, it doesn't really work out for you. No matter how good or bad your classroom management is. Those students had lost an easy A to some unknown entity who was actually attempting to teach and grade their assignments. On top of that, I was also given no support for what and how to teach a subject I had never taught before. Even with all that, I was able to get a lot of momentum with those kids, and I did everything I could to maintain the order of that classroom. By the end of the year, I had won over a lot of those children, and I was crying much less frequently!

Shockingly, at the end of the year, I turned down the chance to work for them again the following year. Instead, I was called in August from someone from my student teaching year who was now a principal asking me to long term sub in his new building. He told me he was given a list of names, and he knew me, so he wanted to offer it to me.

I taught accelerated 7th graders and regular 7th graders in English. It is the place where I had the biggest class sizes, hitting 40 students in one section, but I had a blast teaching there. I received a compliment at one point by the counselors because not a single student wanted to switch out of my class, which wasn't usually the case. All I remember about that school and some of those classes in particular was how much we would laugh. It was fun.

In that classroom, I taught a young Bre (who is a student I taught again in PH). She was so shy and quiet, and she was dealing with bigger things than I realized at the time, but this feels like one of those destined places and people on my path because I was supposed to be her teacher for those eight weeks in her 7th grade year. Even now, I have a vivid memory of us making eye contact in that 7th grade classroom as I taught, and I can picture the timid look on her face. I genuinely do not know another student's face or name, and maybe that's because our paths never crossed again as Bre's did, but I don't think it would have happened for anyone else if I am being completely honest. She was burned into my brain, and I will always have a soft spot for her in my heart. (There might be another section about some of my students from PH in my upcoming post, and I will probably have some more things to say about this student when that happens.)

After that role, I was asked to sub for a teacher going on leave, and I worked at an IB school. The students were brilliant, and I taught 9th grade English and Speech courses. Overall, those classes had a lot of creativity and freedom in what they were able to do. In many ways, it's a precursor to where I work now. I remember one girl who was very religious and scary about it, but when I left, she got me a copy of her favorite book (Pride and Prejudice) and notebooks because she knew I loved journaling. I think that I learned through that school that I can connect with just about any student. If someone who is scary religious can love me in the same way that LGBTQ+ students do, then I can be anyone's trusted adult.

My final long term sub role was at another middle school, and I was able to teach 7th and 8th grade intervention courses. In this role, I worked with a wonderful parapro, and I loved how creative we were at coming up with activities for the kids. I also taught an accelerated 6th grade course and an accelerated 7th grade course. By the time our year was ending, the other 6th grade teacher had asked me to cover her upcoming maternity leave during the following school year if I didn't get a permanent job, but she told me that she highly doubted I would be without my own position in the following year. Turns out, she was right in that assumption.

My teaching journey was not a straight path, and I was knocked on my ass repeatedly. However, throughout every single position, I was able to learn classroom management because I would be there for 6-8 weeks, so I had to figure out how to build relationships. Honestly, I was very good at creating unique assignments and activities during that time. I had nothing to lose because no one was evaluating me, and I was only there temporarily. If something didn't work, we pivoted, but I wasn't attached to any activity or curriculum. I knew I had a unit worth of time, and I could do that unit however I wanted, and the teacher could come back and start their own thing. No harm. No foul. It was what my internship should have been.

I know that I have signed up for some hard experiences by making the choices I make, but I believe strongly in delayed gratification. If I think that something is the right or wrong choice, and I am willing to live with the outcome of that decision, I am going to make that choice. If we look back to Sandusky, I knew I didn't want to work there, so I worked two jobs and sorted my decisions based on that choice, and I do not have a bit of regret. I believe that I needed all of those subbing placements to train me into the teacher I am, and it is ultimately what made my job at Port Huron that much more special.

Getting my job at Port Huron was a hard fought win, and I loved so much about that job, especially in comparison to the experiences I had had prior to it. It is a place that changed my life, and I look forward to sharing that story in my next post. Stay tuned...