IT'S ABOUT THE KIDS & IT’S NOT BORING “It's about the kids, right? It's about how the kids (…) interact with us, how they engage.” “It is at least not boring. My brother works in an office in a cubicle. I could never do that (…) Even on the worst days, it's not boring. You have engagement. It's exciting. It's different. There’s always something happening. And I love that.” | |
PLAYFULNESS & JOY “If I worked in an office building there wouldn't be as much sense of play (….) It's a little bit whimsical, too. I think that's a perfect fit for my personality. I can put humor into my lessons.” “There are things that happen in the classroom I can't see happening anywhere else. I have these stuffed animals that have a battery that's broken inside of them, so I try to fix them. So the kids are doing standardized testing and I like to give them a five-minute break every twenty-five minutes. So we're all sitting there, we're at our computers, it's boring for them, it's boring for me. Suddenly we get to the five-minute break. I pull the stuffed animals out. I put them on a desk. I put some gloves on. I put a mask on. I brought this screwdriver set. I start prepping for surgery and I'm opening up the stuffed animals and taking the batteries out. I'm trying to fix the batteries and the students are crowding around me and they're going, ‘Don't kill him! Don't kill him!’ I go, ‘Screwdriver, please,’ like they're a nurse, and they give me the screwdriver, and they're taking it and poking the stuffed animals. I'm like, ‘You're killing my patient!’ and I wasn't even able to save them because the batteries were broken, no matter what.” “No matter how stressful my morning could be, no matter how much is put on my plate at the end of the day by the administration, or how many emails I got to respond to almost every single day, there are those moments where there's a silly situation and I'm laughing and the kids are laughing. And that's where I get a lot of my joy. Even outside of the lesson itself, there's a dynamic that I just can't see in any other field (….) And that keeps me going, even on the stressful days.” | “I GET TO BE CREATIVE WITH WHAT I LOVE TO DO” “The content. My relationship to the content is huge.” “When I sit down on a Saturday to plan my lessons—which is not ideal, nobody wants to work on a Saturday, and I do wish there was a better way—I'm excited to plan my lessons. I'm excited to think, How can I? What is my relationship with the theme of a text? When I watch a movie, how do I get a theme from the movie? Okay, now, how do I put that into something kids can understand? And so now I'm finding a fable online. And I'm putting together a graphic organizer. And I'm thinking, How do I prompt this kind of thinking for them, but let them do it? I get to be creative in that aspect. I get to be creative with what I love to do (….) So if I'm reading a text (…)—The Diary of Anne Frank , for example, because it had so much meaning for me— I am able to spend so much time and enjoy that time spent on designing that lesson. That unit. Enjoying the outside-of-work hours that I spend on it. It is huge.” |
“I ENJOY THINKING ABOUT IT ALL THE TIME, REMEMBERING PARTS OF THE DAY” “There's this one Ted Talk (…) and they started off with ‘I'm always either thinking about school or at school, or on my way to school.’ And that idea of always thinking about school is so true. I will come home from the day of work and I try to just focus on enjoying my evening, and I will get caught up in the interactions I had. Hey, remember how that happened today? I actually smile a lot of times when I think that.” “And those are those little interactions with the kids that I've had, those little moments (…) And I'm smiling in my kitchen as I'm making dinner, because I had a good day (…). I love interacting with these kids. I love the relationships I have with them. And when it comes to summertime, and I'm sitting at home, or I'm going out with friends, or I'm doing this and that, it doesn't provide that same amount of content to reflect on. I don't even want to listen to a podcast or watch a TV show because I have so many things in my brain to think about that make me happy because it happened earlier today. (…) even outside of work it still makes me happy.” | |
