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 

“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.)