A Return to Teaching

Tomorrow I go back to regular teaching for the first time in 17 months.

I hesitant to call my time working in education as a "career".

My employment record is like a preteen boy's attempt at facial hair: patchy and thinly spread. But each piece feels hard earned and prideful.

I started this blog in 2009. I was student teaching. I blazed "Both Sides of the Desk" across the page and documented my first forays into being a leader of a class as I exited from being a student myself in college. Get it? Two sides of a desk- student and teacher... I should stop explaining that; hopefully it's meaning was clear since that title perched over my lengthy musings for a good while.

Student teaching concluded. Enter 2010/2011. The "Not My Own Desk Yet" time period. I was substitute teaching, hence all my desks were borrowed, on loan from teachers with sniffles, newborns or newborns with sniffles. A bit of a week here, a smattering of a month there... It all trickled along giving me just enough to talk about at family gatherings, but not enough to make me feel purposeful as a member of society.

There more horrible days than bad days, more bad days than good days. I couldn't put together a plan for how to take this profession of teaching and turn it into... something. More than it was. The job market was abysmal. I completed a 6 week long-term sub job. The job was the most difficult task I've ever completed, for a myriad of reasons. The day after it concluded I couldn't picture myself teaching anymore.

So I quit.

Shamelessly. Completely.

Quit. I'd like to pounce upon the scoffs of others and shrill declare, "I have reasons! So many very good excuses in a variety of shapes and colors to choose from!"

I can rattle my spiel of justification as a well-rehearsed monologue. Because that's exactly what it was. I repeated "I'm tired, the administration, difficult students, horrible hours, no job future, no pay, inner city, not my passion, the state government, the national government, IS THIS WHAT I WANT FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE?" to everyone who would listen.

And my parents, bless them... let me quit.

I moved home with my parents. I got a job at a sporting goods store. I had a social life.

I ate a lot of onion rings in bars at 1am after closing the store- laughing with my coworkers and not missing morning commutes, grading tests, angry parents blaming me for their children's behavior, administration keeping track of how much paper I use in the copy machine... I had a vodka sour and friends and didn't have to be at work tomorrow till 3pm and I was 21 and happy.

I spent my paychecks on Under Armour (with my employee discount!) and gas to drive to see my boyfriend. I ate Lean Cuisines out on the store's loading dock and my left pocket liner wore through from carrying both a box cutter and a walkie-talkie every day.

I spent six months wearing sneakers to work. I didn't miss standing in heels for 10 hours just so I could be taller than my male students and scrape up some authority from height. I wore a pony-tail and fitted little boys for their first t-ball mitts and they always liked me.

My boyfriend became my fiance and I happily put my hourly paychecks away from what was now OUR future. Instead of making end-of-semester exams my coworkers and I ate starbursts in the deer blinds during our back-to-back holiday shifts and gave each other stickers for our name badges. Everyone in my family got sporting goods Christmas presents and it was the merriest I'd felt in a long time.

Spring sprung as it always does, and by summer's start I had to leave my beloved sporting goods job and go get married. So I did.

And we moved to Houston two days after the wedding.

And then what do I do? My husband is among the sharpest tools in the shed, brightest crayons in the box, whatever people say. He launched himself into his engineering job and vanished for 50 hours of the week.

Meanwhile, I got a puppy and told myself it would be perfectly acceptable to spend 6 months unpacking our little household and I couldn't possibly be expected to get a job before Christmas. It was currently July.

Unpacking boxes is not a task one can make last forever, thought I gave it my best effort. As fall (or in Houston season terms- very slightly less summer) creeped in- I knew I had to find employment.

I couldn't justify going back to retail. My year at the sporting goods store had been lightning striking just once, and I knew that. The people, the atmosphere, the work itself- I couldn't capture the magic again. I was honest with myself in acknowledging, at least in late night talks with my hubby- I was taking a time-out from life that year. I can't live in a permanent time-out, purposely not moving forward, digging in my heels and refusing to act like a grown up.

But being a grown up meant going back to teaching. And I wasn't in love with teaching. Or in "like" with teaching. Teaching and I were not speaking. We are not "facebook friends". Teaching doesn't know me. Hadn't we mutually gone our separate ways?

No.

Teaching and I didn't have a mutual break-up. I ran away from teaching when life got rough. I grappled with defining myself by my profession, if I dislike my profession do I then dislike myself?

How do I see myself in the world? As a teacher... a wife... a daughter... a person- just Jennifer? Being a teacher is something you must be with your whole self, all of your heart and efforts thrown into educating is the minimum required to be truly impactful. True teaching demands all of you given over or you can't connect to the students, they won't relate to you, you'll be cold and they will be too and everyone suffers. But the giving of myself means frequent exhaustion, both mental and physical. People "burn out" of teaching in almost the literal sense.

I eased myself back into the pool of education. I sat on the steps for awhile and mentally told myself I wouldn't drown- I'd had the training, I knew how to swim.

And then I stood in the shallow end. By that I mean I signed on with a private school as a substitute. I could say no to any job, no permanent ties. My phone started ringing, and I went back into the classroom.

It wasn't bad... wasn't horrible. There were days that were less than pleasant, but on the whole -the big picture I'm trying to teach myself to see- the children wanted to learn, the administration was nurturing and organized.

I didn't hate it.

Teaching and I were getting back together.

Almost a year and half after I quit teaching, I'm going back. I accepted a part-time position at the private school to teach Media & Yearbook and run a Study Hall program. It's not a full sweep back into totally teaching- but it's certainly more than subbing. I'll be at the school five days a week, every afternoon.

My first day of In-Service is tomorrow morning, the first day of school is the subsequent Monday. As I got ready for bed tonight, I felt very unsettled. I felt as if my ducks were not in a row, something was unchecked off the to-do list. I got all the way into bed, my husband snoring beside me, when I remembered.

This blog.

I've chronicled all of my teaching jobs/endeavors, why should this new phase pass away undocumented? My mind and heart would not let me sleep until I'd poured this piece of myself out. Now this section of my timeline has been chronicled and tucked into it's proper place, I feel I can sleep soundly.

Tomorrow is the start of something new. Something new that feels very familiar.

I'm finally ready to go back. Everything will be fine.

I do have a week's worth of cute outfits already picked out after all.

Here We Go...

This is the start of my last week at my long-term sub job.

I am so incredibly grateful for this job. It was a real blessing that it came my way. For six weeks I didn’t worry so much about future work because I was so absorbed in my current work. Now, the end is looming up ahead a mere four days away and the nerves are creeping back.

It is hard not to get depressed at the condition of my state’s education system. It is the worst it has ever been. Ever. We’re 10 billion dollars in debt and current projections for the 2011-2012 school year are that 1/3 of my state’s teaching positions will be cut. I don’t get into the politics of the money and the government because:
1. I know I don’t know everything.
2. Me dissecting out the situation in no way creates any change- all it does is make me feel sick.
3. Nothing is truly finalized yet. Schools won’t have the ultimate bottom line for their budgets until sometime in July or even August.

I don’t know how I could have worked any harder at this job than I have. Early mornings and late, late nights- I gave all I could. Now I can only sit back and wait to see if it was enough.

Morning Snapshots

I wanted to show everyone some of the bits of my teaching world. I know I tell about things all the time, but face it. Everybody likes pictures.

I came up with this idea on Tuesday. Unfortunately- I can't have my phone (aka camera) on me very often while I'm at school. And for some reason the past few days I couldn't seem to find things I liked/cared about enough to include. So here on Friday I'm just putting out what I have. I hope it satisfies.

It all really ended up being a walk-through of things I see on a typical morning.

This is one of the first things I see every morning. On the whiteboard in the teacher's lounge is a long list of the teachers out and the substitutes in for them. For the past month and a half my name has been a permanent resident of the top of the list. I know the list isn't a leaderboard or anything but I like to think it is. Top sub!

Another fun thing to discover are lil' notes people anonymously leave for others.

In the teacher's lounge is the compliementary tea and coffee chart for us hardworking public servants. At the start of this week this cute note appeared on top of the tea dispenser. At least they (whoever they are, I genuinely don't know) was nice enough to draw some hearts.

One of my early morning tasks 9 times out of 10 is to go make a bunch of copies. I like to use the copier in the library rather than the one in the front office for a couple reasons. 1. A very diminished chance of running into an administrator when I still have sleepy eyes and one hand is clutching my chai while I blearly watch the machine chug out paper. 2. The Zen Garden.

It's been there since my first fall semester, always in the same copy paper lid. Sometimes it is nice when you're running off two different back to back three digit copy jobs to lean over and rake some sand around.

After making all my copies... I head to my room. Everyday we have to write our "learning goals" on the board- the ultimate objective for each lesson. Since I teach 3 different subjects, I have 3 learning goals instead of the average teacher's 1. Which means I have 15 lesson plans a week instead of 5.

These are the learning goals I had for Friday. Not particularly exciting, but a good representation of my daily work. Also- now everyone has been exposed to my terrible handwriting. I know it's awful. It has all the stereotypical flaws: Goes from really big letters at the start of the sentence to small ones at the end. I have a poor ability to visualize invisible lines on which to write my sentences, so they roll up and down like peaceful hills. And my letters, like the capital "N's" are awkwardly tilted. Bah.

Oh, and "IWBAT" stands for "I Will Be Able Too." Abbreviations are a teacher's friend.

The school announcements have gotta be loaded online everyday. Which means the files have to render into a format suitable for being on the internet. Basically what you need to take away from this is that rendering takes a long time. A loooooong time. I spend a lot of my day staring at screens that look like this:

Not exciting. The percentage ticks up slooooowly while the 'estimated time' fluctuates up and down (mostly up).

I hope these morning picture tidbits(new favorite word) were more exciting to see than I'm thinking they were...

Team-Teaching Dreams...

I miss having a buddy.

When you’re a student teacher, you’re only part teacher (as the very name implies). You have another half- a mentor teacher. The two of you are constantly together. While in the beginning it is certainly an adjustment getting used to being around another person so closely all day; once the comfort levels have been established you can operate as a highly efficient team.

Working with my mentor teacher during the fall semester made me a HUGE advocate of the ‘team-teaching’ style.

Team-teaching is literally what it says: teachers working as team. I have heard of some schools (usually wealthier ones who can afford two adults per room) implementing team-teaching but its definitely underutilized.

With two teachers, the vast workload is halved into something feasible to handle.

Teaching encompasses two basic things: Instruction/Assessment & Classroom Management. Those aspects are never split 50/50. Never. At least not in any classroom I’ve ever been in. If you’re lucky you can maintain levels of 40% instruction, 60% classroom management.

Classroom management is a large umbrella statement for a vast range of “keeping-the-kids-focused-learning-not-imploding” strategies and techniques. Anything from a simple tap on the shoulder to silence a chatty student, to organizing assignments and breaking up bigger discipline hassles: fights, insubordination, etc.

When classroom management is being enacted, 90% of the time instruction must cease. It could be only for 15 seconds telling a student to pay attention/sit down/stop talking but it disrupts the flow of the lesson. Multiply those 15 seconds by 20 times and you’ve lost a solid 5 minutes of class. As class is only 50 minutes long- that’s a substantial loss. The worst part is honestly that’s a conservative estimation of time spent on classroom management.

With team-teaching, instruction can flow uninhibited and separately from classroom management. One teacher is engaged in the lesson, while the other is walking the room, monitoring, taking students aside, keeping them on task. Disruptions can be targeted and dissipated quickly without pausing the lesson. Both teachers avoid becoming overwhelmed with the dual tasks of achieving student comprehension and maintaining a peaceful environment.

At my long-term sub job I’ve really for the first time felt the burden of being the sole adult in a room full of 12/13 year olds. My voice has to do two things at once: teach and discipline. I’ve found it difficult to switch rapidly back and forth between the two modes. By the end of a class I felt like I’ve run a marathon.

Team-teaching has more benefits outside of actual class time. Lessons don’t come pre-packaged and ready to go. They take an enormous amount of prep work. Physically creating the: powerpoint notes, handouts, rubrics, tests, homework- plus all the work of photocopying, laminating and grading is enough to bury a teacher. Two people obviously can get twice as much done twice as fast than one person working alone.

I wish my state had enough money to make team-teaching a state-wide policy. It would have so many benefits, one being doubling the amount of teaching jobs! I understand the intense potential for conflict between teachers- sharing authority can be difficult and personality issues could abound.

Perhaps I’m jaded in a good way because I had such a great experience during student teaching. Even with the possible problems, the team-teaching benefits so outweigh anything else- for both students and teachers.

C.O.O.L.

Maybe it’s the school I’m at… but I feel like middle schoolers (at least the ones I’m around) are much more “clothing experimental” than I remember being when I was 12-13. How the kids choose to make themselves look can be down right odd and they’re doing things I could never think of, let alone imagine would be trendy.

I can’t believe it took me so long to tackle this topic. It’s been rolling around in my head for awhile. I think I was worried I couldn’t do it justice. There are a bazillion (that’s right, I said ‘bazillion’ and Microsoft Word didn’t underline it in red- so it’s a real word!) different aspects to cover, so this could be really interesting… or lame. I apologize for the ‘hodge-podge’-ness but that’s me trying to get all my thoughts out.

The instigating factor for this is today I had about 10 minutes of downtime with some of my more talkative girls and they totally broke down middle school fashion for me. I’ve incorporated their input with my own observations.

I had the idea of taking pictures of my students and their ‘fashion’ (to offer a true visual representation of course) but there is really no un-creepy way to do that. One of my girls let me take a photo of her hair, but that’s all ya’ll get.

I know middle school is a time of self-discovery; the first time kids are starting to feel independent from their parents. They’re finding out their own identities, their own styles. Those styles encompass a couple of things pretty consistently.

Colored Contacts. These were not around last semester, but it seems during the weeks I’ve been subbing they are suddenly on every eyeball I see. Most kids (like one of my chatty girls) get light blue to offset their dark eyes and make them look oddly distorted. But some guys have gotten weird reflective ones that make their eyes look like a dog’s when you shine a light on them. One guy had majorly freaky ones that blocked all the color from his eye, so it was all white with a pupil. There’s nothing in the dress code about color contacts as far as I can tell. This trend is shared equally between boys and girls.

Of all the fashion trends, I think make-up is the one that echoes my own middle school days the most. The standard for girls is still a raccoon. What a revered creature for young girls. Goal: as much black eyeliner and mascara around one’s eyeballs as much as possible. Combo that with the colored contacts and you’re good to go.

If you want to know a middle schooler’s interests, favorite color, etc- look at their arms. Like a myspace/facebook profile, their arms are covered in everything about them. Popular items include:
- Silly Bandz. These are flimsy little rainbow colored rubber bracelets that pop into any shape imaginable- a flower, dinosaur (that one is coveted- especially if it glows in the dark), a cat, a heart, whatever. They’re dying in popularity, thank goodness. Back in the fall semester, we used to bust kids selling them in the bathroom like drugs.

- “I <3 Boobies.” This is a popular bracelet sold by some organization (I honestly don’t know who) to raise money for breast cancer something-or-other. It’s really wide and thick, made of rubber and comes in every possible color. I’m pretty sure this bracelet was banned for the ‘boobies’ word (ridiculous), but if that’s true no one is enforcing it.

- Then there are a medley of assorted things. Plastic admittance bands from Six Flags, random pieces of string or yarn, the other standard rubber bracelets from any sports brand, and all the possible pseudo-surfer/prep bracelets from the interchangeable American Eagle/PacSun/Holliser/Aeropostale.

Any bare space on an arm is then filled in with doodles. Kids write all the standards; “I love _insert crush of the week_,” their own name, the Superman ‘S’ or just a ton of hearts and squiggles.

Converse are mandatory in middle school. I can have 25 kids in a class and I’ll see 15 different pairs of Chucks. I guess there is a memo when you get here in 6th grade- “Go by Converse… in many colors.” I say kudos to Chuck Taylor for selling all those shoes, though I bet he didn’t envision this is how his namesake would end up. Supplementing Converse are shoe laces. Heaven forbid if you left the shoelaces that came with the shoes in those eyelets. You’d be shunned. Some kids have only one or two pairs of sneakers, but clearly they have at least 10 sets of shoelaces. Glittery, ribbons, every bright color, printed with skulls, polka dots- whatever. Just not white.

Things Middle School “Gangsters” Use to Make Themselves Look…. “Gangster”:
- Anything that would be totally normal for a five year old.
Examples: Sesame Street t-shirts, tiny Barbie or Spongebob backpacks and different colored socks for each foot.

- A pair of jeans or khakis (preferably dickies) that must be worn either slouched under the butt cheeks (to display the power rangers or Corona boxers) or with the pants highly starched and aggressively cuffed above the sneakers.

- Rosaries as necklaces. Actually, these have been flat-out banned at my school because of the gang ties. Sometimes you can still catch a guy with one under his shirt, but the hammers come down pretty hard on rosaries.

- Hair gel. Copious amounts. The two options are complete opposites:
o Spiked up in gravity defying spears that glisten in the florescent light.
o Slicked back flat to the skull in an impenetrable intimidating hair-helmet.

I’ve overwhelmingly noticed hair has become vital to one’s ‘look.’ Apparently with hair- more equals awesome. More, that is, in the timeless style of “emo.” I looked up the definition of the word emo. Emo: overly emotional or melodramatic. I’ve heard it thrown around a lot to describe everything from someone who wears all black, to suicidal tendencies to now- a hairstyle. One of my students happily declared she has ‘perfect emo hair’ and she let me take a picture.



Her hair has no distinguishable part, and most of it is swept forward so it covers her eyes and face. I have no idea what that girl’s forehead looks like. A mandatory aspect of the hairstyle is a useless ponytail that serves no discernable purpose. And of course- dye your hair black or at the very least dark brown- that does without saying.

When I was being enlightened by my female students, I made the dreadful mistake of remarking something was “cool.” The girls all laughed and shared looks. “Miss Martin doesn’t know what ‘cool’ means!” one of them, (I’ll call her… Zettie) declared triumphantly, like she’d exposed I was an alien.

Me: Ok. My bad. So what does ‘cool’ mean now?
Zettie: Alright, I’ll break it down. Cool means: Conservated. Overrated. Overweight. Loser.

Yeah.
You read right.

That’s what cool now stands for.

“A three year old told me that even!” Zettie says to reinforce my stupidity. I told her “conservated” was not a word. I asked her twice how to spell it. We googled it and looked it up in the good ol’ websters, ('conservated' does not exist) and she just declared “Whatevs, it means something to me!” and laughed.

At this point the bell rang and Zettie and her friends swept off to the rest of their day. I was kind of impressed a girl who can’t remember to come to class on time has a four word acronym memorized.

I’m sure my teachers looked at me and my 12 year old peers with the same head-tilted-like-a-dog-who-hears-an-odd-noise expression and tried to understand.

A Teaching Trilogy...

I believe my teaching career (at least the beginning) is a trilogy of sorts. And
being this is a blog, I'm breaking my trilogy down into three titles.

“Both Sides of the Desk”- student teaching

“Not My Own Desk Yet”- substituting

“My First Desk”- fo' real teaching- (not perfect... makes it seems like I'm jumping back to kindergarten... ‘My 1st Desk,’ I mean first teacher-grown-up desk!)

Those could be book titles. Hmmm...

I think to write a book, (definitely bookS) you have to feel what you have to say deserves to be preserved and distributed to the world. Mostly I feel like I'm just whining a lot, though I try to be objective, receptive and full of inner-outer perspective. With a side of cheesy stupid wordplay.

I'm continually surprised anyone reads anything I write. When I blog, it feels like I'm writing something down, putting it into an envelope- then tying the envelope to a balloon and releasing it into the sky. Will anyone ever see my words?

If I was going to write a book, I feel (I have a lot of feelings today!) I'd have to be very disciplined about the whole endeavor and not treat the daunting task casually. I'd make a writing schedule and hassle people for grammar checks at regular intervals.

In short- I would totally suck the fun out of the whole experience of writing life down. I love the blog set-up; very 'go with the flow,' write things down as they happen. I don't think, at least at this point in my life, I could sit down for hours+ and churn out large chunks of stories. I'd lose the "realness." I spend a lot of time with my blog entries before I post them... and half the things I write get reread, reread and then deleted.

If I allow my life to simply happen and I continue to document it as I go- I see no reason why I couldn't go back, tweak the whole thing (and fill in the start of student teaching I missed by starting "both sides" a month and a half before I graduated) and call it a book. Whether anyone would actually pay money for my words is the true dilemna haha

Besides... I can't set out to write my teaching trilogy yet. A teaching ‘duo’ doesn’t sound as good. I haven't got my own teacher-grown-up desk. I don't know how the story ends!

Keep Calm and Carry On

The title of this post "Keep Calm and Carry On" comes from that phrase which was used by the British during WWII as a morale booster. It was printed on posters.... but then never really got out there. In the early 2000s, the slogan was rediscovered and a new generation took it to heart. I'm working from it now!

My long-term sub job concludes on April 1st... no joke. That Friday will be my last day of that steady work.

I'm trying really hard not to freak out.

I know I'm the type of person who likes to have control. I'm perfectly happy if I know what I'm doing a week from now, a month from now, a year from now. I love schedules and routines. Being a substitute has a been a long lesson of me learning to let go of control. I think God is probably doing that on purpose to teach me patience. Sometimes I want to shake my hands at the sky and say "I get it! Lesson learned! Can I have a full-time job now!?" ....but being impatient about finishing learning the lesson on patience seems ironic and pointless... and won't get me closer to the end.

I've used the emptiness of the Spring Break days to spend a solid half day hitting up every school districts' website within 40 miles of me. Over and over and over again I saw some variation of this little delightful blurb:



No teaching jobs. No openings for subs.

*sigh*

I can be okay with not getting a full-time teaching job for the fall. I can continue to sub and pray and look for a job. I say "can" be okay because I have to hurtle over 2 things:

My own pride- I worked so hard in school (I'm good at school!) and finished college a year and a half early with honors. So I had the mindset that I would graduate and find a job just as quickly and effectively. But I know I'm not alone in my unemployed demographic... the jobs simply aren't out there right now. It doesn't reflect my abilities. The jobs just aren't there.

Desire for independence- I'm currently living at home with my parents. I could afford to live on my own right now... but I would be pulling out more money from my savings than I would be putting in. Living on my own is not worth that continual financial drain to me. My parents are wonderful, and there is no shame to staying with them. So I tell myself. I'm currently still supposed to be in college, so so what if I'm staying here while I work to get a salaried position? My mom cooks amazing yummy food and my dad can fix anything and everything. I've got it good.

All I need is one job. :) Even though my state is having some serious struggles with the education system, all I need is one job. And I AM okay with the "waiting" game till I find a full time position. Everything is going to be alright.

Deep breaths.