“There have been a lot of trials. The first three or four years were focused more on myself and how to become the best version of a teacher that I want to be. And I'm still working towards that.” | |
YEAR 1: SURVIVAL & RELATIONSHIP-BUILDING “I went into the classroom. It was very much a just-survive-this-year kind of thing. I reflect back on it now and I notice myself getting walked over by the students and having problems with getting to the lesson. But I noticed right off the bat that I was able to create relationships with the kids in an authentic way.” “For example, there was one student who was quick to react. She had a foul mouth, and she was one of those kids who would have a hard time with authoritarian figures. I noticed I sort of shaped in that first year this idea that I'm not authoritarian, but I lead by example. And so one day in class, when she cussed me out (…), I took a breath. I said, we're going to talk about this later and I walked away. I think normally an adult would snap right back at them, but I tried this different thing. Later, she actually apologized to me for saying that and we dug a little deeper into what had happened there. So over time she would be saying that I was her favorite teacher. I recognized there was something there that I had done to form this trust and this bond with this student.” “And I kind of expanded that out to my other classrooms. So I didn't simply tell the kids to shut up, but I asked them to be quiet and I explained why. So I really started to focus on relationship building.” | YEAR 2: FOCUS ON DESIGNING GOOD LESSONS “And then, the second the year--so Covid hit, we went into quarantine. I was able to focus more on the lessons themselves because you have kids who don't have their camera on (….) I actually struggled with that aspect of not having the relationship there, but I focused in on the quality of my lessons. And I built the lessons based on what I know. Yeah, there are standards. But what value do I really see in reading and writing? And how can I translate that to them?” |
YEAR 3 AND ON: FOCUS ON LESSONS THAT ARE MEANINGFUL “After Covid, when we came back to the classroom, I drew on my experience to create some lessons that I felt had a lot of meaning. I try to do things that are novel.” “Let's say we are reading The Diary of Anne Frank . I brought a lot of my own being Jewish into it and I didn't shy away from things that were happening in the world at that time. I brought in the actual diary as a supplement to the play (….) The first year I taught that, I just kind of was surviving, and I said, ‘Let's just read these lines. Here's what dialogue is: blah blah blah.’ But now, this year, I dug into the meaning of it and I read her diary to the kids and they were quiet as I read that, naturally, and they found out what happened at the end. I felt like it was so much more impactful. You know, kids were crying at the end of that play. I even had kids come up to me and ask me what I thought about the Nazis getting away with it, or about (…) how only a fraction of the number of those who had died in the holocaust (…) were condemned for their crimes. And it's questions like that that show me that I actually I got to something there.” | |
