Hanson's Ridge
Here is a some background for you. It's a long story, but bear with me. In 2007, I was in college and working in a cafe and didn't really care for the way the waitresses were being treated by management. Another college student I worked with told me that she was about to quit to go be a substitute teacher. The pay was better than what we made at the cafe (we weren't allowed to keep our tips), and she told me that substitute teachers had complete control over their schedule. That sounded pretty fantastic, although I wasn't sure if I really wanted to be with kids all day every day. I was a history major, which meant people were always asking me if I was going to teach when I graduated. I really had no idea what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't want to teach. And I had one more year of school to figure it out. Within a month, I'd quit the cafe and had my first day as a substitute teacher. Within two weeks of starting subbing, I was researching what I needed to do to apply to graduate school to become an elementary school teacher. I fell in love with the work instantly: interacting with kids, sharing my own love of learning, and building relationships, even for a short period of time. The next fall, I wanted something a little bit more predictable as I needed to figure out how I was going to pay for grad school, so I ended up getting a job as an assistant teacher in a Montessori preschool. I worked with three to six year olds and learned a couple of things: I didn't love teaching reading, as much as I loved reading books. Preschool was not my favorite age group. And Montessori wasn't the place for me because I wanted childhood to be full of imagination and magic as well as practical life skills and math manipulatives. Over that same year, I also started dating my husband, got engaged, bought a house, and graduated with my history degree. In the fall, I ended up going back to subbing because I missed working with older kids. I almost immediately got a gig as a semi long-term 3rd grade sub in a gifted and talented classroom. It completely reaffirmed my decision to become a teacher. I grew to love (almost all) the kids in "my" class. Read-aloud time became a special part of my day. In January of 2009, I became a long-term sub in a 6th grade classroom, and taught that class from the end of January until the end of the school year. They were a tough bunch but I loved them fiercely. I also began to see some problems with the system I was getting ready to join. My kiddos were really struggling with fractions. I'd exhausted all the material in my math text, and asked my team mates for advice on how to proceed. They gently told me that I needed to move on anyway, because there was too much more material to cover before the end of the year. They were compassionate, sympathetic, and sadly right. If I'd spent all the time I needed to get 21 students to master fractions, we would have left a great deal uncovered and they would have been woefully unprepared for SOLs. I went through a lot with those kids. We took field trips to Pennsylvania and DC, including one on the Metro. I sat in an art gallery with my bunch of tough guys and talked about what makes art. I found out that one of my kids, a refugee kid from Somalia, had been masking his inability to read with a tough-guy attitude. He was fluent in three languages but couldn't read or write fluently because of interruptions to his education. I had to send him off to middle school at the end of the year and pray that a teacher there would understand the wonderful boy behind the tough guy facade of a six foot black seventh grader. When he hugged me goodbye on the last day of school, I teared up and could hardly say good-bye. While I was with that class, I had my interview for grad school. The interviewer, who would later become my mentor, asked "Why do you want to become a teacher? Don't say you love kids, everyone says they love kids." I talked about the joy of seeing one of my preschool students go from struggling with letter sounds to reading whole words, seemingly overnight. I talked about the growth I'd seen in my students. I didn't say "because I want to help kids bring up their test scores." After winter break, I successively long-term subbed in another 3rd grade classroom, a 5th grade Advanced Academics (formerly Gifted and Talented) classroom, and a 6th grade classroom again. In all of these jobs, I formed relationships with my students. But I was already beginning to see a discrepancy between the ideals my professors were teaching in graduate school and the reality of No Child Left Behind. In the fall, I started a long-term substitute position as an art teacher. I'd briefly been an art major and loved working on art with the kids, but mostly I loved the freedom. I had a strict curriculum to follow, sure, but art class was process oriented, not product oriented. I started a writing club and ate lunch with students as they shared their writing with me. I was sad to leave at winter break, but excited to start my student teaching. I student taught in fourth grade and kindergarten, and had fabulous teacher mentors and a great mentor professor (the same one from my interview). I learned a lot about teacher language and the work that goes behind the scenes in a kindergarten classroom. But man, the teachers at that school worked so hard. We were supposed to stay with our mentor teachers until they left for the day, no matter the time. My fourth grade mentor told me that she and the rest of her team had made a New Year's Resolution to leave no later than 5pm each day (after arriving between 7:00 and 7:30am). We stuck to that pretty well. Kindergarten was harder. My mentor teacher sent me home usually around 7:00-7:30pm each day, while she left around 9:00pm. I was never close to being the last one to leave the parking lot. You see, this was a "failing" school. It was a Title I (high poverty) school, with lots of English Language Learners. It doesn't take much to see that a 100% pass rate was unrealistic when kids were arriving from foreign countries each and every day. Yet meetings were all about data. You didn't want to have too many "red" squares on your classes spreadsheet (failing scores). You wanted "green." Kindergarten assessments took so much time that we didn't have recess many many days. I worked in Kindergarten in March and April, and I don't think we went outside a single time in March. This was in northern Virginia, so March temperatures are usually above freezing. I guarantee, this was not how the teachers wanted things to be. That summer, I started interviewing. I got a job at another Title I school, fortunately one with much more positive leadership. I loved working there. I loved the administration, my team, and my kids. I didn't work quite as long hours as I did student teaching in kindergarten, but I still usually stayed until 5:00 most of my first year. By this time, I had already decided that testing culture was too intense, and was considering homeschooling when I became a parent. I had seen how kids got left behind or held back, depending on their skill level. My students, almost all of whom were at least bilingual, thought they were stupid because they could't pass reading tests that often confused the teachers. I had a brilliant boy from Central America. He arrived in October and did not even know enough English to understand my "good morning." By June, he was writing poetry and participating in class discussions. These were supported experiences, but mind-blowing compared to the general expectations of language acquisition. He was exempt from the reading SOL, but still had to take the Math and Science SOLs in English. It takes an average seven years to learn academic language. He'd had less than a year. I had another little boy that year who came in for the Writing SOL sick as a dog. He was intelligent and a decent writer, but he was so sick that day that he got the sample question wrong, even after he was told which bubble to fill in. He had to take the test anyway and it went in his records. No matter how great the school was, the system failed these kids. They left feeling defeated and "bad at school," and headed off to a middle school with gangs and preteen pregnancy. They did not have the armor they should have had. I don't know what they are up to now, but I think about them and the rest of their classmates frequently. At the end of my first year of teaching, redistricting meant that many of the teachers would be "destaffed" and need to relocate to different schools. I was guaranteed a job, but either needed to interview and be hired or be placed in an unfilled position later in the summer. So I started interviewing. I was also seven months pregnant. At one interview, the principal pulled out the dreaded spreadsheets. She showed me one class with many red boxes. "This teacher deviated from the lesson plan here. He won't do it again." Given that I'd just told her one of my strengths as a teacher was my creativity, I was not surprised when I didn't get the job. I ended up taking a year off. I realized something during that year. I loved being at home. I still had a need to work, but I loved being a mother and spending time with my new daughter. And looking at her, I wondered how I could put her into such a broken system. After a year, I needed to go back for at least one more year, and fortunately ended up finding an opening back in 5th grade at my old school. It was the advanced academics class, which meant that I had more freedom. My kids were more likely to pass the tests because they were good students and mostly proficient in English, so I didn't have the same kind of pressure. We were able to bring in some fun math curriculum (they raced oranges down the hallway with their noses--I can't remember why but there was a good reason), studied classic literature, and dove head-first into National Novel Writing Month. Yes. That was why I wanted to teach. I wanted learning to be invigorating! By the time testing rolled around again, I knew I wasn't coming back. I was nine months pregnant with my second and we had moved out to the country. My students told me that it made me nervous when I walked around the room monitoring testing. They said that it made them change their answers because they worried that they were wrong if I stopped too long. They said my footsteps were distracting. But state rules require constant monitoring, so I was told that I had to circulate. Well! That backstory was a bit longer than I expected. Stay tuned for Part Two, also known as the TL;DR version.
1 Comment
Karen
8/19/2016 11:22:57 am
Great story. Even though I am aware of teachers' frustration, I've never heard that perspective in such detail before. <3
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AuthorHi! I'm Stephanie Hanson. I live with my husband, Himself, on Hanson's Ridge in Virginia. Archives
September 2017
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