How to Teach Junior High and Live to Tell About It : Submission for Busenhalter Magazine, July 2004
Junior year of high school, experience truly great teaching in the person of a twenty-three year old Stanford alumna and decide you want to be her when you grow up. After graduating from the same university she went to, go to work for a public relations agency in California's Silicon Valley.
Learn how awful hourly billing is (if you go to the restroom, do you bill that to the client? The company? Or just work more hours to make up for it?), and that a college degree means nothing if you can't get a reporter to talk to you on the phone about your client's product. Suck it up for a year, then join the dot-com revolution. Learn how easy it is to run a company into the ground. Get a writing job at a second dot-com. Expect it to be a perfect fit, as the salary would indicate. Realize it is the side projects--writing a column, volunteering as a Girl Scout troop leader at a homeless shelter in San Francisco's Tenderloin, the poorest, most drug-addled neighborhood in the city--that feed the soul. Decide to find a new career, away from technology and and the corporate sector. Determine that being a full-time musician is not an option when the band breaks up. Establish that a passion for literature and writing, and a sense that the most important work to be done is with children, means that teaching is the logical next career step.
During further dead time at work, apply for a credential program. Get in. Get bronchitis. Get laid off from the copywriting job. Get an interview for a job teaching seventh grade English after three weeks of beach-going, hair-dying, and partying, at a school who fired a seventh grade English teacher for throwing a desk at a kid. Ponder the fact that you have never, ever, in a million yers, pictured teaching junior high school. Decide it's time for a challenge. Take the interview. Take the job. Take a 50% pay cut. Take teaching credential classes after beginning to teach. Realize that lesson planning is helpful, as is knowing how to respond when a twelve-year-old boy who can barely speak or read calls you a bitch.
Work with kids who are poor, who have family members in jail, who are on free or reduced lunches, and realize how truly sheltered you have been in this country. Go home many days and cry from exhaustion and empathy. Learn as much from them as you teach. Get as creative as you can. Connect fun activities, like T-shirt making and peach bake-offs, to books like Holes. Read The Outsiders and create pretend families and job charts, role-playing the book on a personal level. Act out scenes from Shakespeare. Realize that fundamentally, you love it. Love being in a classroom and not at a desk. Love being "the cool teacher." Love sharing music and poetry with adolescents. Love hearing about, and meeting, their families. Love the hugs, and the stories, and the stickers, and their journal entries. Love that if you show caring for an adolescent, he or she will care about you back. Come to understand that this is your calling.
Understand, too, that without support from adults, you cannot survive teaching so many difficult children at once. Transition to a new school district that pays more, has fewer behavior issues, and is more focused on curriculum. Learn that children's issues are the same everywhere; no matter how much money or education a child's parents have, that child might still be abused, neglected, or going through a divorce. Kids everywhere have learning disabilities that make school hell. Kids everywhere have social issues that make school hell. Become responsible not just for delivering high-level curriculum, but for counseling, managing parents, serving on committees, organizing events, chaperoning dances, and grading papers. Acknowledge that no matter how much mentoring you have, a lot of teaching skill is developed by doing.
Get really good at memorizing 150 names within a week. Also memorize each child's handwriting, so if they don't put their names on their papers, you can still give them the grade and return it to them, and writing style, so that if they plagiarize, you notice, and catch it via Google Advanced search. Chat with parents at the Back to School Barbecue, Back to School Night, at various events and at the local supermarket. Constantly have the impulse to say, "Nice to meet you" to parents because you've got enough to remember already without also remembering which parents go with whom. Get to know the nice ones best, because they compliment you and share insight about their child in a non-demanding way, and even send gifts sometimes. Hug the ones who tell you they thought you were 22.
Get in touch with your last name and wish it was something simpler, like Smith. Realize that your tattoos will be front page news. Realize that at least your Stanford degrees will, too.
Be happy that even though you have to wake up at 6:30 every morning, which means that you are always the first to leave any weeknight social gathering, you at least get the afternoons to work out and do things like go to museums, readings, and plays, and read books. This somewhat makes up for the fact that you never meet eligible bachelors and can't stay awake on a Friday night past 11 pm.
Deliver curriculum all day, in as engaging and creative a way as possible, to adolescents who would rather complain and show their midriffs and boxers. Never sit at your desk, no matter how desperately you might want to, because you have to be up there teaching a lesson. Remember who came in late, who has to leave early for the orthodontist, what you said yesterday about the book report and whether it was said to first period or just second through seventh, who needs to come in at lunch to make up a test, whose birthday it is, and who is probably PMSing. After school, there are staff meetings, committee meetings, parent conferences, parent emails to respond to, school events to attend, and the occasional kid needing counseling.
When kids tell you that you are a role model, and have inspired them, realize that it is all worth it. Hold your head high and be proud of your work. Count on the support of friends and famikly to stay alive in this job. Be grateful to everyone who has listened to ranting and raving, weepy stories, and funny anecdotes. Alice Walker once said that in time of social repression, the best thing you can do is to be as creative as possible. Teaching itself is creative; it also makes room for creativity in your own life. Join a teacher band. Realize that this is the most important work you have ever done, and the hardest. We all have something to offer society, and we can all find the right path for ourselves if others support us. Hope that someday, you get to see some of your students in the classroom, carrying that torch of love for literature, writing, and other humans on. Smile.
