To be fair, I don't think I had a very typical Teach For America experience. You hear these horror stories of people feeling completely underprepared and they get eaten alive on the first day of school. The children can smell fresh blood and they know exactly how to draw some more if you aren't ready to deal with them from the get go.
Thanks to my teaching degree and a really great content specialist at the TFA summer institute, I was a few steps ahead of the 80 other corps members that joined along with me. I already knew how to lesson plan, I had some classroom management strategies, I knew several instructional methods to get kids engaged and, most of all, I knew my content inside and out. I got some practice during my student teaching and at institute, so I knew what teaching Spanish was supposed to look like.
The next big challenge I was told to expect was a disengaged staff at my placement school. Incompetent administrators, ornery old teachers who forgot long ago why they ever went into teaching and were now simply collecting a paycheck, secretaries who wouldn't help you unless you bribed them... I was steeling my nerves for the worst, but my colleagues turned out to be amazing. Young, passionate, talented individuals who were eager to get their hands chalky and several seasoned veterans that still had the love of teaching in their hearts. I was very lucky. Sure, there were a few folks that I didn't agree with, but I knew I still had a lot to learn so I shut my mouth and opened my ears.
It was hard not to fall in love with my school. The halls were bright and inviting, with gold-yellow walls and burgundy lockers, the school colors. Since it was still a new high school, we only had grades 9, 10 and 11 my first year, and total enrollment was around 200. Class sizes were fairly small for a city school; no more than 25 students in each class and usually a lot less than that.
The biggest difference between my school and most other schools in Baltimore was that we were modeled after another successful charter school network in Chicago. We had a very strict code of conduct that outlined consequences for positive and negative behavior, the dress code, and the emphasis on the culture of achievement above all else.
In that first year, I wholeheartedly believed that my school was a place where everyone was focused on learning. My administration supported me and teachers were empowered to do what was needed to do their jobs well. My colleagues were my best friends. The students spoke about being a family and we were. At times dysfunctional, but what family isn't? If nothing else, we had love and it was apparent in everything we did. Teachers loved working there, kids loved going to school there and I truly felt like I was making a positive difference in the lives of children who needed it most. I couldn't have imagined a better place to be.
Certainly the first year was not without incident. I learned very quickly that race and, to a greater extent, class are still huge barriers to academic success in our country. I discovered the very real power of learned helplessness. It seemed like every student in the school had personal experience with violence, drug abuse, gangs, sexual assault, and the death of a young friend or family member and these traumas would manifest in the classroom from time to time. It was shocking and gut-wrenching and depressing and it filled me with rage every single day but I knew that's why I needed to be there.
I wasn't exactly the miracle worker that I thought I would be. For all my prior knowledge about teaching, I still had no idea how to plan a curriculum or how to develop a meaningful end of year goal to strive for. We had no texts or planning resources and so everything we did was created by yours truly. I had so many ideas but no systems to implement them. I think my saving grace was that it was the first year that the students were offered Spanish and they were just as excited as I was to be there. It was a challenge every day but at least I felt like we were all learning, myself more than anyone.
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| Teaching Dream Team |
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