This entry is the first in the summer workshop series I promised a few posts back, in which I reflect upon my teaching career as I’m about to begin my 20th year. I’m not saying anything I write here will wind up being included in the eventual manuscript, but hopefully along the way I’ll find my voice and decide exactly what it is I want to say.
I can honestly remember the moment I decided I was going to teach. One morning my friends and I walked into our 6th grade class to discover that Miss Fischer, our teacher, had gone and done an extreme makeover to the whole room the night before. New bulletin boards, new posters, new name tags on our desks, and a brand new desk arrangement, new everything. Our classmates arrived with building energy, taking in the sights, looking for their desks and discovering (either with excitement or a notable lack thereof) who they sat by now. My first thought when I walked in that morning was, “It would be so cool to be the one who gets to do this.”
I grew up in an extended family of teachers. I do not exaggerate when I say that if you took everyone in the three generations of teachers who were either born into or married into the family and put them all to work in their areas of expertise before the retirements began, we could’ve operated our own K-12 charter school, including the administration, the health office, the band, the choir, and all of the coaches.
I lived my live hearing my aunts and uncles and cousins talk about their classes. When I got to high school, I kind of cheated on an aptitude test the guidance counselors made us take -- I read into what the questions were trying to find out and answered them in ways to guarantee my counselor would tell me to become a teacher. Originally I considered being a band director because I thought music was the only thing I came close to excelling at, but declared myself a Communications major after one of my high school English teachers told me my writing would be wasted in the classroom. An ego stroke like that is hard to brush off when you’re eighteen, it seems. But it became clear in a hurry that it wasn’t right for me, and soon after that I was back in the Ed. program, now focusing on English instead of music -- the thing I was actually good at instead of the thing I just wanted to be good at.
English was okay. A lot of the class work was pretty subjective since it seemed like all we ever did was read archaic literature and then write papers that agreed with what the professors told us the books meant if we wanted good grades. But it got old pretty fast... the example course I always fall back on was “Survey of 18th Century British Literature, Part 2.” Because only one survey class wasn’t enough to contain all the boring. At about the same time I was home for a weekend and watched a really awful B-movie called “The Principal,” starring Jim Belushi. He was the tough guy with the heart of gold and aluminum baseball bat that was going to clean up the horrible high school he’d been assigned to as a punishment, even if it meant crackin’ skulls with that bat when the students came after him all weaponed up. Being preternaturally naive, I started to wonder if that’s what high school was really like: Is EVERY kid in a gang? Do they ALL have guns and knives? Will I need to rely on my wits when they stalk me through the deserted locker room, after they’ve stabbed security guard Louis Gossett, Jr. and handcuffed him to a radiator so he can’t help me? This was seeming like too much. I wondered a version of this concern aloud to my mother, who nonchalantly said, “You have a day off next week. Why don’t you come to my school and spend the day in my classroom? See what it’s like.”
She taught second grade, so this was nearly unthinkable. Little kids? Didn’t they all still constantly cry and wet their pants at the same time? But that bloody gash on Jim Belushi’s forehead made me think it was at least worth a try. Good thing I did too, because nothing in my life before or since clicked as hard for me as the first full day I spent in an elementary classroom as one of the adults.
From that point on, I had a calling. The professors in my Ed. courses were finally talking about things that mattered. The people in class with me got it. We weren’t in it for a career -- we were designing a life. I got a job at the Boys and Girls Club, which turned out to be way more educational than too many of my classes were. I survived my field experiences without failing miserably, and managed to get through my student teaching with some degree of success. It all culminated in a frustrating year of my life spent as an indentured substitute teacher who landed the occasional job interview that never panned out. I even had a rejection letter from one show up in the mail not two hours after my interview had ended.
Subbing was no ride around the lake, but it gave me some great experience. I got a lot of sub calls from the school where my mother taught, which turned out to be pretty important later on. By the end of the school year, I’d had enough days in the building to feel I could ask the principal there to write up a recommendation letter for my application file, and he obliged.
When I made it all the way to Job Interview #11, two weeks before school was about to start, that letter paid off. At the end of my last interview, the principal who would be hiring me the following day asked if there was anyone in particular she should contact from my recommendations. While she asked me this, I noticed she had already started writing down the name of my mother’s principal. It turned out the two of them were good friends.
The phone woke me the following morning. Bonnie, my new principal, offered me the job, and we talked about formalities for a few minutes.
“I’m very happy to have you joining our staff,” she said as we ended the call.
“Words don’t exist to tell you how happy I am,” I replied. She laughed at the joke, but in the moment I was completely sincere.
This is what I knew I was supposed to do with my life, and now I was going to get the chance.
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