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.

Bigger isn't better - but smarter is!

In modern American society, children are told that they can grow up to achieve anything they so desire.  Do you want to be an astronaut?  Good, you can do it!  Do you want to be a famous singer?  You can do it!  Do you want to be President of the U.S.?  If you were born in this country, you can do it!  Kids grow up thinking that any of their wildest dreams can be achieved with nothing more than self confidence, motivation to keep trying if times are tough, and a pinch of good luck. 

What completely baffles me is the fact that while society is preaching to children that they can be anything they want to be, nowhere are children being told that achieving goals doesn’t happen in the blink of an eye.  Reality check, kids:  you’re not just going to be approached out of nowhere while you’re at the grocery store and asked if you’d like to be President of the United States.  A big talent agent isn’t going to “discover” you if you have never sung in front of anybody in your life.  You’re never going to be offered a job as an astronaut if you spend your life working in retail.  Achieving goals simply doesn’t happen without taking the preliminary steps to get there.

Back in fifth grade, a bunch of my classmates and I were asked to write a paragraph describing what we believed we would be doing in our lives in the year 2015 (this was back in 1998, which would put all of us at the age of 26 or 27 in the year 2015).  Most of my classmates wrote paragraphs about becoming famous athletes, actors/actresses, and rich doctors.  My peers all desired fame and fortune, for they felt they deserved both simply because they could dream about it.  After all, mom and dad always said they were great and showered them with presents all the time (oh, the fun of growing up in a "privileged" community...), so that meant they were entitled to all the fame and fortune in the world, right?  

Did any of these people actually grow up to achieve their goals?  Obviously, 2015 is still three years away, so I can’t say for certain that these childhood dreams have gone unfulfilled at this point in time, but what I can say is that the likelihood of these dreams becoming a reality for most of my former classmates is slim.  If you rarely drag yourself outside of the house to practice your soccer techniques, how do you expect to be able to play the game well enough to earn a college scholarship for soccer?  If you can't even make your college's official soccer team, you’re not going to become a famous soccer player.  If you don’t even take acting or voice lessons when you’re young and aren’t talented enough to land a lead role in the school play or musical at some point in time, guess what?  You’re not going to be a famous actress.  And what about the girl who wanted to be a doctor?  Getting into medical school is tough, and in order to get there, you need to do exceptionally well in school in order to get into a topnotch college and continue to do exceptionally well in undergrad in order to have a chance of getting into medical school.  I'd hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you're not going to achieve something for which you did not work.

So what’s really going on here?  Are kids setting their goals too high?  Should they aim lower?  Not at all!  In fact, I’d encourage my students to have big dreams and go for them; I just want them to be aware that “going for them” involves a lot of hard work starting at a young age.  If they want the dream badly enough, they will work for it, even through the most difficult times.  Kids need to be taught from a young age that a strong work ethic and careful planning are the most important - and critical! - steps in fulfilling their dreams.  Only after kids recognize the need for these two vital ingredients are they in the position to either go forth and achieve their dream or discover they want to strive for a different dream along the way, which is immeasurably better than growing up to become depressed adults plagued with regrets and unfulfilled dreams.

By the way, in case you were wondering, I wrote that in 2015, I’d be getting "a degree or two" in something I enjoy (“Whatever that is.”)  In real life, I finished two degrees by 2011, so now what?  Do I get a prize for my prediction actually coming true (and coming true four years ahead of time)?  I'm expecting a trophy from my elementary school any day now engraved with the message, "I DONE GROWED UP AND ACHIEVEDEDED STUFF!!!11!" in messy, little-kid writing, preferably with all e's flipped backwards.  :-P 

“Mommy, where do job applications go after you submit them?”

“They are sucked into a black hole, dearest, where they live a peaceful existence with all the socks that are eaten by the washing machine and are never heard from again!”


Sometimes I feel this way when applying for full-time employment. Obviously, there is a very competitive market in this economy, especially when it comes to teaching jobs. Left and right, teachers are being laid off due to budget cuts, so new teachers are left to fend for themselves against more experienced teachers who were just laid off because they were at the bottom of the pecking order at their previous school. Schools need to decide whether they want to hire a new teacher or a teacher with 1-5 years of teaching experience. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who is getting all of the jobs (as a side note, my boyfriend actually is a rocket scientist, so perhaps I’ll have to retire this phrase. Or maybe I should use it more! Hmm…)

The budget cuts of schools also cause a problem with me in particular. I have a Master’s degree already, unlike most new teachers, who must take evening classes in their first few years of teaching in order to earn one. This basically means that I’m an expensive hire, since the schools have to pay me a larger salary because of my degree.

I have been told by a number of my former classmates that most school districts do not contact new applicants for interviews until the summer months, especially in August. Until then, I am still submitting applications for jobs in both the teaching field and also in fields related to my undergraduate major. There are an abundance of jobs with competitive salaries (some of which are on par with – or greater than – the salary of a teacher with a Master’s degree!) that also catch my eye. Basically, right now, I’m applying for everything for which I am qualified in the two geographic locations where I would be interested in living. We’ll see who calls me back. I would like to think that at least one or two of my applications weren’t sucked into a black hole, but who knows.

The future is undercertain and therefore quite exciting!

Password Denied.

Now that I am in the midst of applying for full-time work, I can say one thing: my favorite part of the interview process is when I give my interviewer the key to my house and tell him that he is on his own for a few hours to search as he pleases. After all, what better way to analyze a person’s character than by searching through her drawers, perusing through the items in her filing cabinet, and even reading her diaries from middle school? Forget those pointless reference letters that my three references took hours out of their day to compose – what conclusions about my character could possibly be put together from those, anyway? Dig up some dirt in my house, and please refuse to hire me because I left a dirty sock on the ground in my bedroom; surely, that must show that I am a sloppy and incompetent worker.

Okay, so none of my interviewers have actually asked me to hand over the key to my house (yet…dun dun dun…!), but I am finding myself quite outraged at the issue brought up in this article from Time Magazine. Basically, a teacher’s aide was fired because she refused to hand over her Facebook password to her employer after a parent claimed to have seen a photo on this woman’s Facebook page that was deemed inappropriate. The Superintendent wanted to see the picture for himself, but the teacher refused to give her password to him.

The article left me with a few questions. First of all, if the parent was able to see the photo on the teacher’s Facebook page, unless the parent (or her child) was Facebook friends with the teacher, how is it that the parent can see the picture, but the Superintendent needed the teacher to hand over her Facebook password in order to see the photo? Couldn’t he have created his own account (or signed into his account, if he had one already) and see the same photo that the parent saw, since the privacy of the photo was obviously not set to “Friends Only”? Did the Superintendent just assume that because there was one “inappropriate” photo, there must be more that needs to be investigated?

While undergoing any teacher education program in this day and age, it is probable that you will have a discussion about the use of Facebook on more than one occasion. Should you have a Facebook account if you are a teacher? Should you change your name on your Facebook account so that your students cannot find you? Should you accept friend requests from your students (most schools have policies against this, although some teachers believe that it is okay for students to add them so long as the student is no longer in that teacher’s class; other teachers do not accept friend requests from students until the student has graduated from high school and/or college)? There is no simple answer to any of these questions, and it’s really up to the teacher’s best judgment to deal with these issues, should they arise.

That being said, it is also the teacher’s responsibility to make sure that the information she posts and posted by others about her on Facebook – especially information that can be easily used as blackmail or deemed “inappropriate” – is hidden from the public eye. You don’t want to be like the New York principal whose spring break photos, taken straight from Facebook, were passed around the school or the Georgia teacher who was fired because pictures of her holding bottles of alcohol while on a vacation were made accessible to students via Facebook. If you are a teacher and opt to use Facebook, please make sure that all of your posts and photos of you are set to “Friends Only.”

Another word of advice: keep everything “Friends Only”; don’t make anything visible to “Friends of Friends.” If you do, you run the risk of one of the people on your list of friends perhaps knowing one of your students by coincidence. Maybe the student is a neighbor or a cousin of one of your friends. Maybe you added an old student because she graduated from high school, but she is friends with her own younger brother, who is currently in high school and would love to dig up dirt on you. It only takes one student to spread your information around the school.

As for the issue of handing your password over to another person – what’s the point? You’re not asked to hand over the password to your personal email account to your boss, so why should that be expected of your Facebook page? People can act entirely differently in a professional setting than they do in a personal one, and when a person is an employee at a company, the professional is who is going to show up to work every day.

So employers, yes, you can look to see what a potential employee has made public to those on Facebook, but don’t ask him to hand over his password unless you are willing to give him your password in exchange. I’m willing to bet that the information available on your personal site isn’t 100% professional, either, especially in your private messages. Or how about your personal email account or text messages? Let me read every text message you’ve ever written to your wife because it will tell me everything there is to know about your character.

Seriously, when it comes to a person’s character reference for a professional position, just stick to the reference letters. A lot of thought went into them, and I’d hate for you to dismiss the opinion of a person who has actually met and worked professionally with your potential new employee over a picture on Facebook of your potential employee doing a “gangsta” pose with some friends. (Waddup.)

How's this for an "attention-getter"?

Are you a jerk?

What if I were to approach your parents and ask them this question about you? “Hey, Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So. Is your kid a jerk?” What would they respond? Well, let’s see…do you talk back to your parents? Do you remember to call them? Did you take your mother out for her birthday this year? What about if I asked your closest friends the same question about you: Are you around for them when they need a shoulder to cry on? Have they ever caught you spilling one of their secrets to other people?

More likely than not, you probably get along quite well with those in your family as well as your closest friends. Chances are, also, that over the course of your relationships with these people, you’ve exhibited some jerk-like behavior toward them every now and then. Do these sporadic moments of jerkiness cause these people to classify you as a jerk overall? In most cases, probably not, since with every episode of jerkiness you’ve displayed, you’ve probably also had a multitude of episodes that demonstrate your more positive qualities: perhaps you bought your friend the watch that struck her fancy for her birthday or did your parents’ taxes for them. Perhaps you sacrificed a whole evening’s worth or work in order to comfort a friend after she had been fired from her job. Whatever the case may be, those who know you well know that although you have your “moments”, you’re an overall-decent person.

Now let’s ask those who dislike you the same question: Are you a jerk? A larger quantity of these people would probably respond with a “yes.” Why is this? Most of the time, those who dislike you do not know you as well as your family and close friends do. I mean, you do not like one another, so how much time have you actually spent getting to know one another? Too often in life, a single negative interaction or annoying habit can lead to one person’s disliking of another one, which can eventually grow to a great tension – sometimes even the formation of enemies! - between two people. For example, let’s say Billy and Sally are complete strangers, and Billy accidentally trips Sally with his foot. Gasp! Guess what? Billy doesn’t apologize. After Sally becomes offended that Billy did not apologize to her, it is imprinted in Sally’s mind that Billy is “rude”, and she forms the rest of her opinion about him as a whole person based on his actions, or lack thereof, in this one incident. She starts noticing all of the “rude” things that Billy does – a time when he loses eye contact with a person he was talking to; a time when he is sending a text message to a friend when another person is talking to him; a time when he burps and doesn’t say “Excuse me!” – and tells her friends that Billy is just a rude person. Word gets around to Billy that Sally is talking about him behind his back, and Billy grows angry at Sally for trying to tarnish his reputation. He may start calling Sally rather crude names behind her back, starting a vicious cycle of rumors and name-calling.

The bottom line is this: Do these two people actually know one another well? No. Did they take the time to get to know one another well? No, because one incident (the accidental tripping without the apology) led one individual to form a negative opinion about the other individual. Since the negative opinion of the offender had already been formed, he can no longer redeem himself by showing off his more positive qualities in the future, as once an opinion is formed, it is not easily changed. Plus, by that time, the two individuals have had other conflicts with one another, conflicts that are much more personal than the initial incident, conflicts involving false rumors and name-calling and everything that people should have stopped doing at age eight but for some reason keep doing into our adulthood. Really, this stuff is gold for Reality TV, but pitiful in real life. (Side note: If you don’t believe that people start disliking one another for reasons as stupid as getting tripped by accident and not receiving an apology, you clearly don’t know people!)

In a story, there are characters who are “round” and characters who are “flat.” “Round” characters are the main characters: those who are developed, those with a back story, those with internal conflicts, those whose thoughts and actions affect the entire outcome of the story. Then there are the “flat” characters: think Friar John from Romeo and Juliet. You remember: “Oh, hey, Friar Laurence! You gave me one simple task to do, and I couldn’t do it because I was locked in a room, since some people suspected that I might have the plague. Better luck next time!” Friar John is a “flat” character. In the play, very little about his personality or background is revealed. He has one role, he plays it (or fails to play it, as the case may be), and then he disappears into oblivion. Great guy!

Too often, people have a tendency to think of other people as “flat” characters with no dimension whatsoever. Let's say a guy cuts you off in traffic. You write him off as a selfish road hog and drive on your merry way. Can you really determine if this guy is selfish? What if it turns out that the reason he cut you off was because he was rushing his son to the emergency room? Would that change your opinion? Do you still think he's selfish? Each person is complex, filled with a lifetime of experiences that shape who he/she is currently and a wide variety of positive and negative personality traits that come out at different times. It’s unfair to judge the whole person’s character by one incident or even by one context. Do you act the exact same way around your parents as you do your friends? How is that different from the way you act around your teachers?

Let’s take a look at this from a teaching standpoint: Have you ever had a student who was just hard to handle? Does she try to sleep in class in class constantly, fail quizzes repeatedly, talk back to you, and turn in assignments late? Did you find yourself dismissing students like these as “lazy” or “rude”? The fact of the matter is that the setting of your classroom is just one context. How do you know that Courtney doesn’t excel in math, even though she is nearly failing your history class? How do you know that the reason Russell doesn’t seem to respect female authority figures is because he doesn’t have a positive female role model at home? You don’t! Students will exhibit certain behaviors in your classroom which may not always be behaviors that they exhibit in other facets of their lives. By all means, you should most definitely correct the behaviors that are inappropriate for the classroom (it’s your job!), but do not be so harsh as to make judgments about the overall character of your students based on what you see in your classroom alone. Do not simply assume that a student's behavior in your classroom paints the full picture of who they are, and most definitely do not give up on trying to get through to them!

Remember: to each person, there is a juxtaposition of good and bad. On that note, some people also have a talking, chocolate goblin with three front teeth living in their brain and giving them orders, but that’s for another day…


This entry has been brought to you by peace, love, and common sense.

The B+ that bit me.

Have you ever had that dream where you’re alone in the woods, and out of nowhere a giant, fanged B+ jumps out of the bushes and starts chasing you around, vying for a taste of your blood? Yeah, neither have I; however, from the panic and chaos that receiving a B+ creates in many people, one would believe that this is a recurring dream for a large portion of the population.

It’s not too much of a wonder why this idea is implanted in the minds of so many. High schools, for one, create competition among students through class rankings, with the top prize promising special privileges: a special page in the newspaper, a marking on your transcript, a chance to speak at graduation, special stoles and/or chords…oh yeah, and bragging rights, everybody's favorite (although most won't admit it.) On top of this, there are lies about the expectations of the nation’s top institutions that are fed to innocent, naive high school students who tend to eat it all up without stopping to check the facts. Oftentimes, these false ideas are fed to them by those who are equally as oblivious and do not have the facts completely straight and therefore shouldn’t be talking, like classmates or parents who applied to college in the last generation when things were a little bit different. “Did you know that such-and-such school won’t accept you unless you have a 4.0 GPA?” Who are you, a spokesperson for the school? Each school has its own standards for accepting students, and GPA is only one element of the application. There’s a reason that applications consist of more than just merely sending in a transcript, you know.

When I was a senior in high school, Yale University invited me to attend an information session about the school. With no desire to apply to out-of-state schools, but still curious as to what an Ivy League school would possibly expect of potential students, I attended the session. The most shocking revelation to me was when the representative told the crowd that Yale rejects 64% of applicants with perfect ACT and/or SAT scores. He went on to say that many of the applicants accepted did not have perfect GPAs either. I wish I had tape recorded that part of the presentation so I can play it back to many of the parents I encounter over the course of my teaching career. Perfection does not necessarily equate to getting into the college of your dreams!

But students and parents are not aware of this. They are under the impression that a 4.0 GPA is an instant pass into any university of their choosing; therefore, some parents send their kids to school and expect perfection: answer every question on the quiz correctly. Receive every point possible on this paper. Get every extra credit point. While these things sound like a solid formula to mastery of the material, this mentality is ultimately making school itself into a “system” that must be “mastered” as opposed to a place where people learn new concepts and grow as individuals.

And what do grades truly say about the student's ability? Sometimes, they are an inaccurate indicator of a student's progress in mastering the skills that they are supposed to be learning. For instance, as an English teacher, I am naturally aware that almost every single piece of literature that is covered in the classroom also has a page on Sparknotes. I would also be naive if I said that I believe that every single student reads the assigned readings from the book instead of taking the "easy way out" by looking up the plot on Sparknotes. Sadly, as I observed in my student teaching, some can do this and still manage to pass the quizzes. Let’s say that I have two students who are given a reading assignment: Student A read the assignment from the book; Student B read the plot on Sparknotes. Both students were able to pull off an “A” on the quiz, and we move ahead in the curriculum. What ends up happening, though? Student B is satisfied with his grade because it is the “A” that he desires, but he’s ultimately not developing the same skills in analytical thinking, critical thinking, and vocabulary as Student A. Again, while both students received the same grade on the assignments, they are getting very different things out of them, and the differences in the reading and writing skills of these two students will increase as the years progress. Sadly, many students see school one assignment at a time and are not paying attention, or are oblivious, to the effects their choices now are going to have for them down the road. As in so many other aspects of life, everything you do (or don't do!) will come back to haunt you later on.

One of my pet peeves about teaching is the fact that it takes me so much time to grade papers because I like to provide each student with a sufficient amount of feedback. Why? So they can take my advice and not make the same mistakes again. In the ideal world, where school is about growth and – gasp! – getting smarter, students would review their papers and think about the comments I left for them so that next time, their writing will be much better. What happens instead? I return the papers, and they are either immediately stuffed in a folder, crumpled up and thrown in a trashcan, or, in the case of those who want to show off that they did well on the assignment, “conveniently” left on top of the desk so that those with wandering eyes can get a look at the student’s superior mark. It’s all about the number at the top of the page, the letter on the report card, or the bragging rights that one has over his friend when he gets a higher score than she does.

So what do we do about this problem? Eliminate grades entirely? No, that causes laziness in many students (if it’s not graded, students don’t put effort into it…) I think it’s time to, first of all, dispel the rumors that parents and students are hearing about what colleges these days expect. Let them know that there’s nothing wrong with a B+, assuming that the student has put his or her best effort into the assignment. Secondly, we need to constantly remind students that it is okay to make mistakes. As much as I despise clichés, there really is a reason that there are erasers on pencils, and it has nothing to do with adding a pink flare of decoration to the otherwise-motonous yellow paint. To err is human, and unless you are some sort of robot or alien or super-sized, floating brain, you will err. Keep errin’! You’re good at it! Most definitely learn to fix your err, but don’t be ashamed that you erred! Okay, time to stop overusing one of my favorite words. (Well, okay, one more time: ERR!)

Additionally, remember that if you see a B+ on your paper, don't scream; it's for the best, I promise.