Life's Diverging Roads

In school, students progress: They pass tests. They complete semesters. They advance to the next grade level. They complete degrees. The most difficult part of my transition into adulthood is the fact that after your degrees are complete, this sense of progression seems to diminish. Unfortunately, the amount of progression I have made in life seems linked to my self-worth (maybe it was the years of brainwashing from the modern educational system?), so when I feel that I'm not progressing enough, my inner monologue is bugging me about why I'm not doing more.

Yeah, okay, so you can get a job, and you can keep doing that job until you get promoted. In some businesses, there is more potential for promotions than with others. When one chooses to become a classroom teacher, there isn't a lot of movement that can be made unless one decides to pursue additional education. Teachers have the option of going back to school to add an endorsement to their certification. They can also go for a master's degree or a Ph.D. Oh yeah, and there's also the option of running out of the classroom, hands in the air, determined to never go back, and just pursuing another degree all together in order to switch careers.

...But then there's the money factor. Unless you live in a world of delusion or in some underground mole society that treats its educators as gods, the teaching profession isn't known for its large paychecks, and going back to school costs quite the sum. Before going back to school, a person has to make sure that he/she is committed to put the time, effort, and money into that degree before signing up for the classes. Most people who go back to school must complete their education while also holding a full-time job because, let's face it, people need money and insurance!

My current project is making sure that I have my three full years of full-time teaching, 150 required professional development hours, and two reading courses completed by June 2017. That must be done in order to ensure that I receive my professional certificate before my provisional certificate expires. So far, I'm a little behind on that because I started working full time in January of last year, but I still have time to fulfill these requirements before the expiration date. (Dang, 2017 seemed so much farther away back in 2011!)

On top of working towards this goal, there are a few other options to explore:

1) Getting an Ed.D: A doctorate degree in education would eat up about seven or eight years of my life, but it would open up so many doors and opportunities in the field of education outside of classroom teaching; however, pursuing a doctorate might complicate my life if I end up getting married and having children in the next decade or so. Key word: if  If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that life can never be planned far in advance; rather, it just happens, and it's important to be ready for unexpected changes. An Ed.D. would also involve a long-term commitment to a university and an area of the country. Again, I'm not sure where life is going to take me in the next few years, so I don't know if I'd be able to make that commitment.

2) Going back to school for a math minor so that I can add a math endorsement to my certification. Okay, so for the last two school years, I have taught math to some capacity, even though I'm technically not supposed to do that. (SHHH!!) At my former place of full-time employment, each teacher taught a math elective during fourth quarter due to the absence of a math teacher. At my current place of employment, I seem to be tutoring a lot of kids in math because they are finishing their English classes in a hurry, but they are stuck on math. Having a math endorsement on my certificate would also make me a stronger candidate for other teaching opportunities in the future, and maybe I could eventually work for a unionized school system! (Note: Is that actually a good thing? I've heard mixed reviews.)

3) Getting a Computer Science Bachelor's Degree: I would have to go back to school for a long time to get a bachelor's degree (I wouldn't quit my job to go back full time, so I'd have to go back part-time) and basically start from scratch, but the world needs more programmers. Plus, with an education background, I could work in designing my own educational programs and selling them to schools, especially now that I've gained a lot of hands-on experience with educational programming at my current job. This degree would also give me the flexibility to leave the teaching profession if I so desired and simply become a programmer.

4) Going to the kitchen and eating an orange: Why? Because I wanted to add one item to this list that I could accomplish right away. CHECK!

So many options...and which one to choose? Which commitment to make? Help me, Batman...by which I mean an academic adviser, whom I will call "Batman". Mister or Miss Batman.

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.

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