Back to School

Well, my summer is over.

After two months of time spent working on myself, learning new things, getting into an exercise routine, starting a Tik-Tok, revising my novel, and sleeping to my heart's content, it's time to get back to the grind.

This was the first summer in years where I haven't worked a summer job - I probably should have for a little extra income, but I was extremely burnt out after the rollercoaster of last year and just needed a break. So students came back this week, and I planned to nurse my sadness at having to go back to work with long sips of coffee and inside jokes shared with my teacher besties.

It's honestly amazing to me that I'm starting my ninth year in education. It wasn't my original goal when I started college; I'd actually planned to be a journalist who did theatre for fun and had time and income to work on becoming a published author. Yet as I neared graduation, I realized that I don't actually like talking to strangers, and that would be a huge part of my job. A friend who knew of my background teaching Children's Church suggested that I look into an alternate route teaching degree, and that was all she wrote.

I've taught in two states, four grade levels, and now I serve as a Reading Interventionist - helping to fill in gaps for students in reading and writing skills to give them a stronger foundation to access the grade level material.

I've never had a year like my first year, where I taught 6th grade ELA. I was thoroughly unprepared for what I was stepping into, especially since I was homeschooled and had no idea how things worked in a public school. Add in the lack of student teaching and no idea how to implement classroom management, it was a rough year. My fifth graders that second year would tell you that I was extremely strict with them, not wanting a repeat of my first year. After that, classroom management was never an issue for me.

Now I work with grades K-5, and it's been a learning experience. I've learned to use my collaboration skills to work with several teachers instead of the one or two that I'm used to; I've sharpened my phonics teaching skills (my education was in middle grades, so there wasn't a lot of focus on phonics), I've learned the names of multiple classrooms full of students rather than the two that I was responsible for.

Many things have changed from when I began teaching until now; the way that education is viewed in the public eye, the challenges of social media and trends that threaten to uproot the order of a classroom, and so many other things.

I even taught through COVID distance learning, which was a learning curve that no one could have expected. I learned how to use different student learning platforms and virtual meeting rooms, and adapted curriculum to address the needs of students who needed to access the materials virtually.

If you had told me that I'd be here nine years ago, I would have laughed. Even when I discovered how good I am at teaching, I never thought that I would be doing it this long. It has taught me a lot about myself; my ability to be flexible, to make split-second decisions, to pivot when things weren't going my way or the technology stopped working. I learned how to enhance a lesson to address students with varied backgrounds and support them in social-emotional learning. All of these things have helped to make me a better person.

So here's to year nine, whatever it might bring, and continuing my learning journey.