I start my third year of full-time teaching next week, and I’ve spent a lot of this past summer reflecting on my growth after a second year as a public educator.
If there’s one thing they told me in graduate school that I’ve found to be true, it’s that after your teacher candidate year and your first full-time year of teaching, it really does get easier. Going through the Stanford Teacher Education Program and being thrown to the sharks in my first year of teaching in the San Francisco Unified School District, I am grateful to say that year two felt difficult, but good. Difficult, but important. I felt hopeless and despairing oftentimes, but when I had a chance to breathe and to turn around see how much distance I’d covered…those days felt really, really good.
Teaching (and I imagine that parenting also feels the same) is a daily, near constant practice of consensus and boundaries negotiation. Students pepper you with asks to the bathroom or for yet another piece of paper, wheedle at you fifteen minutes before the deadline if you wouldn’t mind giving them another day despite blowing off the last three days, peer over your shoulder when you’re on the laptop to see which emails you’re checking, swipe at phones and screech when they experience retaliation, try to call each other strange and sometimes hurtful things when they think you’re not listening. (The secret, children, is that I’m always listening. Not because I’m vigilant. You’re just loud as hell.)
Their experimentation with risks and boundaries though, I have to admit, is also a daily reminder of the joys of life. There’s a special kind of joy when reserved introverts raise their hand for the first time in class, when I know that they know their question or insight is worth the try. I asked students to make a portfolio on Google Drive for their high school years, and each semester they should add three pieces of work they’re proud of. One student added a math exam she got a B on, because 9th grade was the first time she felt like math didn’t have to be so scary, that if she just worked hard enough and trusted the process, she could figure things out. I liked watching boys try on off-the-shoulder crop tops because they just didn’t understand how they worked. I loved when students joined JV teams for sports, submitted artwork to an arts show, or survived their first fight as a relationship (or their first breakup).
And I think that, if a teacher is careful and honest, we have just as many firsts as our students. This year, I followed my volleyball players on their journey to qualify for the playoffs for the first time in school history. It was my first time learning from my head coach how you push the whole team to dig deep and find that fire, and sometimes that looks like yelling and drawing a line with them. I attended a professional development training that felt meaningful, impactful, and hopeful (!! more on that later). I taught College & Career Readiness as well as Health to 9th graders for the first time, and fell in love with all of it. As a new teacher, lesson plans are pretty much your first time every day, and the universe will always find a way to derail the plan anyway.
With all that said, as okay as I feel right now, it doesn’t change the fact that I hit a rock bottom of despair this past year, and even on a good day I wondered how much longer I could continue working and living like this. So here are some things I’m chewing on after my second year of teaching.
We Need Smaller Class Sizes, More Money, Less Red Tape, More Adults
That subtitle is pretty much everything I feel about the state of public education right now. At the Strong Public Schools 2020 Presidential Forum, Democratic presidential candidates have said over and over, “The data is in, there is no question what we need to do.” So if you have any questions as to what’s going to make education in the United States better, that’s pretty much it: more funding, smaller class sizes, more teacher autonomy, down with standardized tests, wraparound support services for all young people, and stop privatizing schools. And for the love of god, please, let’s listen to pediatricians and start school later in the day for adolescents. Honestly, I don’t think any of those need much explaining, but I definitely know after two years that these changes feel true and necessary every single day I’m in the classroom.
I had the privilege of receiving an excellent education from 6–12 thanks to substantial financial aid at the private school I attended. My educational experience was wonderful, with loving teachers and small class sizes, field trips and opportunities to put myself out there as a young person and an advocate for my passions. While every parent should balk at the sticker tag of twenty thousand dollars (my parents certainly did), I don’t understand why that isn’t the norm for spending in public education already. Every child and their education is worth that much. Every year. Full stop.
In public education, every time a student or a coworker had a great idea, it was bureaucracy and the myth of capitalist scarcity that crushed our dreams. We had so many reasonable asks like we need another science teacher, we shouldn’t have to compress multiple special education teachers into the same room, I shouldn’t have 38 students in one class period, we should transition away from AP classes because they’re a scam and inequitable, can we really not afford another set of Chromebooks?, and so on. So many times the conversation ended at “That’s not how the district does things,” or “We can’t afford that” or “Where are we going to get the money from?”
It’s nonsense, garbage, absolute horseshit. It makes zero sense that we are not making concrete steps every single day to meet the needs of all USAmerican schools to serve students because of a perceived lack of funding. Of course this needs to be paired with accountability and transparency, which is sorely lacking across all levels of institution and government in the country. Mismanagement and corruption absolutely need to be addressed in tandem with an increase in resources for our young people. But we’re not doing enough for our people in either capacity. School site communities and unions need to band together to demand accountability in the structures that only make promises on paper and never follow through.
A Pedagogy of Cultural Necessity
Fuck pedagogy of cultural sensitivity, or relevance— we need a pedagogy of cultural necessity.
I’m not actually at all serious about coining a new phrase, but I just want to really press the urgency of a fundamental paradigm shift in how we consider pedagogy in education. We have long passed a point where it is unacceptable to have so many generations of USAmerican adults and youth who have said “I felt like practically nothing in high school prepared me for the real world.”
Schools should be a place of community, and they should teach you to be a part of communities. They should reinforce values of compassion and clarity, of kindness and integrity. To be prepared for the real world should that students realize the only way — the only way — to do well in life is to find your passions, channel it into a purpose that serves yourself and your community, and let those things guide you to constantly learn and adapt to a world that will constantly shift and move around you.
Students need to be highly and critically literate. They need to consume stories from all walks of life and all parts of the world, and they need to see the stories in all forms. Because sometimes stories show up as great novels. But sometimes stories show up as data sets, or qualitative interviews, or fake news articles that need interrogation, or iterations of intensive lab reports or patient histories. And stories need to be told and reinterpreted as public speeches to advocate for policy change, or short films, or podcasts, or infographics, or murals. Or a small anecdote to share over the phone when your best friend is sobbing and in need of a laugh.
And while students are all different and we’ll bore some students with material while thrilling others, we do not have the time anymore for students for things we know children almost unequivocally hate. That’s rote memorization through high-stakes testing (or quizzes or exams or whatever). That’s the literary canon of old, dead, White guys when the teacher cannot lift the relevance of the themes at hand. That’s worksheets, textbook assignments, fill-in-the-blank bullshit. We’re done. Stop doing it.
Teach what is necessary. We don’t have time for anything less.
Trying to Answer “How Can I Help?”
A thing I’ve struggled with as a new teacher has been the question from well-meaning friends who ask how they can help. Oftentimes I’ve thought “Let me get back to you when I’m not drowning in unacceptable conditions.” But today, I’m going to attempt a list to start. If you’re an adult who isn’t an educator, here’s a list of things you can do to help:
- Figure out how your local school district works. Where is power consolidated? Which schools are unfairly advantaged? How? Which schools are suffering the most? Why? The more knowledge is shared among all constituents, the better.
- Donate financially when you can to projects. Especially if you have the means and don’t have children. You still have a responsibility to the youth of your community.
- When appropriate, volunteer your time. Don’t be that asshole who messages teachers like “I’ve graduated from a fancypants school or I have this super cool tech job and I could talk at your students about my super cool journey!” Sometimes I’d just love it if you came in and helped me label shit. You don’t know the temperature of the classroom and it’s nothing personal, but you may be not the best fit to be in front of students. That said, there’s also nothing wrong with asking the teachers in your life how you could come in to volunteer, but do let the educator who knows their classroom guide you there.
- Stop treating teachers like your Shark Tank audience. In a similar vein, it’s genuinely great that you care, but we don’t need your new ed-tech app or ~innovative~ way to transform the classroom. If you’re in the tech/product/business sector of the world, please go through the design process appropriately and let your users voice their needs and feedback in a way that works for them, rather than just coming forward with your own agenda.
- Support all unions and workers’ movements. Teachers’ movements and #RedforEd all over the country have been amazing. Please contribute to strike funds, provide legal support, signal boost, and educate others on how movements like this better conditions for educators and children alike.
And finally, stop saying “I could never do your job.” Because you need to learn how to do some of our job.
Increasingly we live in a world where generations are more siloed and more detached from each other, when folks of all ages need to be constantly learning from each other. So please, stop valorizing teachers for our ability to be with youth. The more you express disbelief that adults could spend so much time with young people, the more children know you don’t think they’re deserving of time.
Please learn how to be around children. Learn to listen to them. Answer their questions honestly and ask them questions yourself. Ask them about their dreams and needs. Listen to them, because the less we listen and the more we invalidate, the more students internalize that they are not full of incredible things to say. And it becomes that much harder for those of us who are professional educators to show students how deeply we believe in them and their learning. And that time spent in getting students to believe that we believe in them is time not spent just learning together.
Finally, to my fellow educators, thank you so much for the community and support you’ve shown me these past few years. I’m so excited to jump into another year with you all, and continuing the good work together.
