I Have a First Name? I Had Forgotten.

Ever since I became a teacher, I have found that I have two distinct personalities/personas.

By day, I am the ever-so-helpful, generally-cheerful, sometimes-irritable Ms. G., who often finds herself in situations in which she is doing ten different tasks at once. Ms. G. is generally a pleasant person, although she cannot tolerate disorderly conduct, and she works to improve her classroom management skills. She focuses on her goal of helping her students improve their academic skills.

Then, I come home and turn back into Stephanie. Stephanie, who doesn't have her life figured out yet. Stephanie, who can be sarcastic, enjoys bright colors, and freaks out when she does not arrive exactly on time. Stephanie, who is trying to make that transition into adulthood, even though she still looks and feels like a child much of the time. Her mind is pulled into many directions at once. She over analyzes the world and the actions of everyone in it. She sometimes still plays video games and colors in coloring books.

One of the biggest challenges I have faced since I started to teach full time is maintaining a life outside of my job, and therefore keeping in touch with the side of me that is still "Stephanie". Socializing with other people my own age has not been at the top of my list of priorities, as I typically leave a day of teaching feeling exhausted and wanting to do nothing more than take a long nap. Then, when I am rested, I wake up and it's time to go to work again! Oh yeah, and dinner and tackling that mountain of grading is somewhere in between...

When I reminisce about my childhood and early adulthood as a college student, I miss having hobbies. I used to play clarinet. I used to paint and draw. I spent Friday nights in college doing all sorts of shenanigans, like filling my dorm room with 300 balloons, making crafts with friends in my hallway, and talking in made-up accents for no reason. A bunch of people in my dorm room hallway and I once held a fake wedding between one of my friends and a blanket and dressed up in mismatching clothes. I am grateful for these hobbies and the memories I have made that are associated with them, and I sometimes find myself longing for the good ol' days of my youth...

Childhood in general is very structured. When a person goes through school, that person is given a schedule that he/she must follow. The same happens when the person goes to college. Once college is over, though, former college students must face the music: adults are not given schedules. You are expected to get a job and work at that job for about eight hours each day, but once you leave work for the day, you are on your own. There are no after-school clubs or organizations; you have to find your own hobbies on your own time. You have to actually make an effort to see your friends because most of them don't work with you.

Oh yeah, and the strangest part about being in your 20s: Your friends who are the same age as you are going through very different stages of life. Some of my friends from high school and college are already married and have children. Others are in medical school or pursuing Ph.D.s and still have years of school ahead of them. Yet others have been working full time for years but have no plans to settle down and get married (a few of my friends my age have never dated anybody before.) One of my friends from high school is married and owns the house down the street from my other friend from high school, who is still living in her childhood home with her parents. No matter where a person finds him/herself at this age, life becomes chaotic for everybody, and adults are fortunate to see their closest friends once or twice a year.

How does an adult maintain a balanced life? How can we find time to socialize or to embrace our talents and hobbies? These are questions I've struggled with for the last few years, and they are questions for which most of my friends around my age don't have an answer because they are pondering the same thing. I am now twenty-six years old. Shouldn't I have this figured out by now? No, and neither does anybody else, apparently. Maybe there isn't a clear-cut answer. Maybe we each have to find our own way that works for us. Or maybe adulthood is about living in a bubble. Who knows!

And now it's time to practice the art of getting up and going to work, an art that has been mastered by both of my personas.

Valentine's Day as a Teacher: Still Stinky

Yes, it's August. Yes, I'm writing about Valentine's Day. Don't worry: you'll survive.

Valentine's Day has never made sense to me. I mean, I understand the concept of Valentine's Day and that it solely exists as a "Hallmark Holiday" that ultimately benefits corporations, but really, what's the point for the rest of us? Why must we conform and celebrate this "holiday" year after year? Whether you're single or in a relationship, it's a holiday that will leave you feeling down.

If you're single, you're upset that you don't have anybody with whom to share this holiday; if you're in a relationship, you are not satisfied with the holiday because no matter what your significant other does for you or vice-versa, some obnoxious person is going to share some over-the-top gesture that his/her significant other did for him/her, making you wonder why your significant other didn't go out of his/her way to do something like that for you. Also, it's a holiday that celebrates showing love to another person; isn't that something that should be happening all the time anyway? Why should a special day be set aside for that?

Schools try their best to shield kids from the unfairness and sorrow that is usually associated with this holiday; in most elementary schools, Valentine's Day is celebrated with a class party in which everybody participates, and those who opt to bring in Valentine's cards and candy are required to bring in a card and candy for each person in the class. It prevents hurt feelings, and it's fair. Good.

The problem starts in middle school.

The Hardest Part Is Letting Go

WARNING: This rather serious blog entry playfully features Buster and Mildred, who are apparently two of the voices inside of my head. 

Ah, the last day of school. As teachers, we all dream of this day that only comes once a year; it's the commencement of two months of freedom: the time to rediscover our hobbies and passions that we had neither the time nor the energy to pursue during the school year; the time to actually wake up after the sun has risen; the time to receive a paycheck every two weeks for essentially doing nothing except lounging around; the time to not have to worry about grading or discipline or creating a lesson plan. Honestly, is there anybody who wouldn't look forward to a couple months of living this way?

This is where I become a spoil sport and raise my hand without reservation. While the last day of school would probably be a very happy day for many teachers, I wasn't particularly looking forward to the closing of the 2013/2014 school year. After all, I knew the school at which I was employed would be permanently closing down, therefore meaning that the nanosecond school ended, I would be catapulted into a summer of frantically applying to as many jobs as possible and balancing a schedule filled with interviews around the state. Worst of all, this would be going on as I was trying to emotionally move myself through the loss of my students.

Why I Teach: Making a Difference Outside the Classroom

I wanted to start my short series of blog posts with what is one of my favorite stories that embodies what I believe to be success outside of the classroom.

From August 2010 until June 2011, I completed my student teaching placement at a large high school that was one city south from where I grew up. Six or seven middle schools fed into this high school, so when my ninth grade students started school, they were surrounded almost entirely by complete strangers. In order to ease the transition into high school, offer some form of consistency, and help the ninth graders to more easily develop a group of friends in a school that large, the high school had a “team” system in which there were several groups of ninth graders that had the same teachers for English, science, and social studies.

Two students I remember in particular were Angela and Sue. (For the sake of protecting the privacy of my former students, I will never refer to them by their actual names.) Angela was in my first hour class, while Sue was in my second hour. They were both shy, quiet girls who enjoyed reading and generally did not socialize with other girls in their class. (Angela’s mother had voiced a concern about this at conferences, in fact.) They were also the top students in their respective classes, and I was impressed by their abilities to carry on intellectually stimulating conversations, even with adults. 

Throughout the entire school year, I wondered in the back of my mind why they were not friends, since they seemed to have so much in common. Then one day, it hit me: Somehow, even though they had the same teachers for three of their core classes and were both in the advanced track for math, they did not have any classes together.

One day, immediately after a school-wide assembly in May, I was talking to Angela, and Sue was standing nearby. I took that opportunity to introduce the girls to one another and mentioned that I thought they had a lot in common. They said hello to one another, and I wondered if anything would become of it or if they’d be too shy to talk again.

The next day, Sue came into my classroom before school to talk to Angela. Every couple of days, Sue would come into the room before school to talk, and the girls would talk. On the last day of school, they exchanged phone numbers, and I was happy.

At that point, my student teaching placement was over, so I was not around to see what happened from there. In the back of my mind for the last three years, I had always wondered whether or not Angela and Sue became good friends but knew that there was a very slim chance that I’d ever find out.

Last month, I found that the high school at which I student taught uploaded a video of their 2014 commencement ceremony on their official website, so I watched the whole ceremony. I was smiling the entire time: There were students I thought could potentially be in danger of dropping out wearing their caps and gowns and beaming; they had made it! I also identified a few of my former students sporting honor cords (none of them were surprises!) Many of my former students looked like they had aged quite a bit in these last three years, while others looked exactly the same as they did in ninth grade.

At the commencement ceremony, the students could sit wherever they so desired; there wasn’t a set order, so students were sitting by their friends. As the camera panned the crowd, I saw shots of Angela and Sue: they were sitting together, talking and laughing. Words cannot begin to describe the happiness that overcame me when I saw that the two of them had become friends after all.

I don’t want to sound like I’m tooting my own horn: I know I have a long way to go in terms of my growth as a teacher. I’m not claiming to be some great, life-changing teacher who has moved mountains for every student I’ve met along the way; rather, this story serves to remind me that there’s more to what I do outside of the academics in the classroom, that there are opportunities to change the lives of kids for the better every day, and taking advantage of those opportunities can and does make a difference.

I hope Angela and Sue remain friends for a long time. 

My Four-Year Job Search: Interviews

The last few years of my professional life have been a bit of a whirlwind. Attaining a full-time job in my field proved to be quite the challenge, and, in true Stephanie's-hilariously-terrible-luck fashion, once I finally acquired a full-time position, the school that hired me shut down a few months after I started, and I went back to applying for jobs once again.

Let's back up a little bit, Edublog world. There is so much about the last few school years about which I need to write: unexpected situations that caused me to have to think on my feet; intriguing episodes and subsequent discussions about classroom ethics; a few particularly memorable students and colleagues; and, of course, some of my *star* moments in the classroom - the good, the bad, and the very ugly.

Most of these topics merit their own entries in this blog, so I will not write about them all today. Instead, I would like to focus on one key component of the job acquisition process that has caused me stress over the last few years:

Interviews.