Thoughts from the space between desk and dry erase
The 2021-22 school year is rapidly approaching its finish, with all the changes this year has brought. In the next few months I’ll probably be living in a new home, working for a new employer.
I’m nearly finished with the first 8-week term of my second teacher credentialing program, and this one is with Alliant University. This course has gone very well, and I’m looking forward to the chance to work as a lead teacher next school year. My recent assignment has reminded me that co-teaching is also a likelihood, but that would be welcome. I had a few school years of collaborating with mentor teachers, coaches, education specialists, and numerous service providers in the four years I worked at non-public and charter schools.
The main reason I’m typing a blog now is to get out my thoughts, my hopes, my experiences as I prepare for clinical practice. I’d like to keep a record of this time, and a website is a good place to share some of the things I’ve been making in my studies.
I can’t help but think of the Capitoline wolf in my grandparents’ basement. It was a little bronze statue, and if we asked my grandma Lou about it, she would say that the twins Romulus and Remus, who were suckled by a wolf, would grow up to found Rome. She had been a Latin teacher in her youth, and spent her working years in schools after raising my dad and his brothers and sisters, too. I think about the ways that she, and my grandpa Ed, communicated a sense of immense depth, that the foundations of knowledge were down so far beneath what we all think about in our daily lives. The feeling was that in books, in learning, in discovery, you could keep a vital lamp lit inside yourself, and always find something new to learn.
Lots of my family members have been teachers, so I have seen the ebb and flow of their careers. I am an outlier, having chosen not to teach in my youth. I passed up a lot of opportunities to earn my credential, and with a few reasons. The main reason was that my most favorite teachers were those who shared an interesting life with us. I respected teachers who had a life outside of the classroom and let you know it if you kept up your end of it(by trying your best in class). So I wanted to be my own person first, and then if I had reasons to pursue work in the classroom, I would be better for it. The second reason I shied away was that I saw how demanding the job was for certain beloved teachers. My music teachers, especially, had these amazing jobs and were often quite accomplished players or singers. So when the layers of parent teacher conferences, evening rehearsals, kids left behind on a field trip, and grade reporting all piled up, I was reluctant to sign up for such a weighty commitment. That said, my cousins and classmates have become music teachers and I think a lot of them are wonderful teachers. So maybe I would do myself a bigger favor by seeing what my peers are up to.
The other main decision that I’m weighing is whether to work in elementary or high school. I have been in a high school in south LA since January, but I feel maybe I could make more of a difference with younger students. I was really interested in that early reading instruction at the end of CalStateTEACH, and it feels like being able to teach reading is one of the main duties of an English teacher.