I Love to Teach

I had two degrees from two different universities, and a lot of knowledge. Theoretical knowledge, that is. Ask any teacher and they'll tell you. No matter how good your teacher preparation program was, no matter how much you feel like you learned, nothing compares to on-the-job training. Internships are great, and they're getting better. But a one semester takeover of "someone else's" kids is hardly enough to be considered on-the-job training. I'm talking your first year as a full time teacher. For me it was really my second year. My first year was spent as a resource teacher split between two different schools. My second year, now that was my initiation year.

In addition to my two resource teacher positions the previous year, I had worked as a part-time tutor for a specialized private school for students with learning disabilities (LD's) and attention deficit disorder (ADD). One of the part-time positions didn't work out so well, so we mutually parted and I needed some more work. A teacher in the private school announced she would be going over to Europe for a year when the semester was over, so I assisted her for a couple of months before she left and then I took over.

Meet the boys who taught me how to teach.

For their privacy, I'm not including their names. But you can tell how close we were by the body language in the photo.

It probably won't surprise you to learn that 80-90% of the students at this school were boys. Boys were more commonly diagnosed with LD's and ADD, and they certainly had more trouble in traditional schools because of their learning difficulties. Each of their stories and how they ended up at our school is worth its own piece of writing. But having mostly boys in class wasn't what made the experience so unique. At this school, with a population rarely reaching 100 students, all of high school was in one self-contained classroom. That's right, I had all grades 9-12, and all subjects, in one room. English, Reading, Writing? Yup, I taught them. Biology, Chemistry, Anatomy, sure thing.  History, Government, Economics, no big whoop. Yes, I even taught Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra 2. I think back and I still don't know how I did it! I was studying almost nightly and I worked many hours after school and on the weekends. Because it was a small school, we all had keys. I would spend all day Saturday in my classroom sometimes, just preparing myself for a big unit or lesson.

I had a lot of flexibility but little guidance. We used a highly specialized language-based curriculum to address reading, spelling, and written language, but the rest was up to me and a book room with a random selection of retired and donated books, and piecemeal purchases by previous and current teachers. I also searched teacher resource stores and the library. The internet was just starting to flourish and was nowhere near the plethora of resources it is now. But let me tell you, when a teacher is allowed to focus on the students and what they need, and teach from standards rather than a set of course materials, the sky is the limit! I learned to build units and lessons, to teach cross-curricular, to use broad-based themes to tie together history and literature, even science and math- though that wasn't as easy. I took them on several field trips each year and helped facilitate service projects in and outside of school. All of it was worth it, a labor of love, because let me tell you about how much I loved these boys.

Most of them landed on our doorstep sometime mid-stream ninth or tenth grade. This is just before the height of standardized testing craziness. Some of them had taken the FCAT, but the year I started at this school was the first year Jeb Bush attached the scores to school grades and student advancement. So these students weren't fleeing their public schools to avoid the testing, their parents were seeking alternatives because their kids weren't learning. One of them came to us because of a conflict with a principal who put him in a chokehold, another was left to sit in the back of the room all year because he didn't "act out" and no one communicated with his parents about the problems in school. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't about how much the public schools sucked, because many of them just struggled because of the sheer size of the schools and the classes. They all had one thing in common. They weren't learning in their previous schools because they had learning needs no one understood. This is not the time or place to talk about the needs of students with learning disabilities, but it is a topic that needs much attention, even more so today. Anyway, the school was designed to give them what they needed in a year or two, boost their reading and/or language skills so they could return to their schools to be more successful. The content areas were secondary to the reading skills- not less important, but helping them to read and write with proficiency was the main objective.

"Problem" was, the culture in our classroom, the safety, the sense of family became so strong kids didn't want to leave. Many of them didn't. Two of the boys in this photo were with me all four years and I had the pleasure of issuing them their diplomas. I had two others who were with me for all four years, and several who were with us for one to three years. But they changed my life. We had so much fun, I developed relationships with them and their families, and I got a sense of what school should really be like for kids- not because their parents paid for it (and some of them went through great lengths to afford it) but because all kids deserve to feel safe and cared about at school. That door, all the way on the left side of the photo, entered into a magical place. It was a classroom in which I felt as at-home as I did in my own house, and I think the boys did too.

We learned geometry together and struggled through Shakespeare together. We ventured into the land of human reproduction and development and I saw the boy all the way to left turn green while watching NOVAs Miracle of Life. He almost vomited and exclaimed. "I'm going to go home and hug my mom and thank her!" He's the same grown man with a full beard who called out to me at a campsite in a state park a couple of years ago while my family and I were driving out. My husband had his window cracked and stopped, asking me if I heard that. I stepped out of the car, and there he was running toward me as he called his mom on his cell phone. It was like I was a celebrity. He was 27- ouch! The boy next to him jokingly asked me embarrassing questions about sex (not personal questions), just to see if I would lose my cool. For the record, I didn't. I just gave them honest answers. He just turned thirty and has a daughter. We've been talking on FB about some challenges he's been facing in his life. Unfortunately, our collective world was rocked when the boy all the way to the right, suicided the summer before their senior year. I remember crying at the funeral with the boys and consoling his single dad who was raising him. We were a family.

These boys taught me so much about myself as a human being, as a teacher, as a new mother. I learned that I didn't have to know everything as long as I didn't pretend to. I learned that a teacher can learn content if they first learn what their students need. I learned that trust and caring go a long way to creating a path for learning. I learned that I could love someone else's children the way I loved my own. I am indebted to them in a way they will never know.

Because of them, I love to teach.