Welcome to your first year of teaching! Veteran teachers will laugh patronizingly at your idealism and your cutting-edge strategies for raising student achievement. But don't pay them any attention. You willmake a difference!
The math manipulatives, core reading books, and tape recorder will have mysteriously disappeared from your classroom. But don't worry about it. You will make a difference!
Your A+ in education psychology will be rendered moot by a classroom of ankle-biting kindergartners with attention deficit disorder, nonexistent English skills, poor hygiene, and perennially runny noses. But that doesn't matter, either. You will make a difference!
Or will you?
Three years ago, after years on the periphery of U.S. public education—instructing adult education and junior college, teaching abroad, writing about education research—I looked in the mirror and decided, “I need to make a real difference.” I cobbled together enough university credits for provisional teacher certification and overnight became an inner-city, bilingual kindergarten teacher. That I made it through the school year and had the temerity to show up for the next is testimony to two factors: my own stubbornness and the kindness of strangers.
Obstinacy Kept Me There . . .
My first experience teaching kindergarten was humiliating. I could not control my students. Their bright eyes twinkled with warmth and innocence, but their voices screeched unrelentingly. If they weren't too busy skipping across the room, wrestling sharp objects from one another, and jumping from the rocking chair to the window ledge to the art table, their cherubic faces beamed at circle time. They also listened with rapt attention at story time, until the urge to thump their neighbors' shoes overcame them, and they dissolved into a giggling, wriggling mass.
Each day was an exhausting battle. I memorized Harry K. Wong's The First Days of School and measured success by the hour. By December, I could keep the class under control until noon. By May, order lasted until nearly 3 p.m. I never did manage to maintain control all day. Instead, I imported 5th graders to sit on the kids from 3 o'clock until the final bell.
Woven into this tumult were a new reading curriculum (minus the teacher's guide); an innovative, hands-on math initiative (minus the requisite manipulatives); teacher observations and evaluations; a personal professional development plan; courses toward certification; required daily grading for cafeteria behavior; recess duty; arts and crafts supplies to buy and beg for; children abused by their siblings; knife-wielding parents; conferences with non-English-speaking parents; feudal principals; feuding coworkers; and a classroom thermostat that permanently hovered at 82 degrees. But I am obstinate, and I refused to believe that 27 5-year-olds could make me—Miss Master's Degree in Linguistics, education researcher, and holder of a Teaching Certificate—leave. I was obdurate because of shame: the shame of hearing “I told you so,” of not being able to handle what colleagues who had less education and fewer advantages were doing routinely. And I was stubborn because of conviction: I will make a difference.
. . . The Kindness of Strangers Made Me Come Back
When you are new to teaching, everyone is a stranger. You have entered a school community that has a history of social dynamics and relationships that does not include you. In a school where you are in a racial minority and where membership in the principal's college sorority is an integral part of determining duty assignments, materials distribution, and evaluations, you may feel doors continually slamming in your face. But only one thing ultimately establishes whether you will join the school community or remain an outsider: how well you control your students.
And well it should. Cutting-edge strategies will not be effective with students who are bolting around the room like bumper cars. You will not be modeling research-based teaching practices if you are screaming. If you can't get your kids to settle down and focus on their interactive, project-based, learning center activities, nobody will learn. And you will destroy another teacher's hard-won discipline if your own class is careening and screaming down the hall. You have to control your students.
So, this is what strangers did for me. They mentored me in the tough-love manner of the inner city: an approving nod when my students stood quietly in the lunch line, raised eyebrows when they did not; unbegrudging respect when things went well, unapologetic confrontation when they did not. Maybe our grade-level teams met on the fly, but collaboration was as near as a colleague passing down the hall:Is that your student pulling down the artwork, Miss Zimmerman? Young man, put that back. Apologize to Miss Zimmerman. Apologize to your classmates. Now!
But the paramount, and most unexpected, kindness was this: unconditional acceptance into the sisterhood of teaching. Veteran teachers in at-risk schools understand what noneducators do not: Dreaming of making a difference with innovative strategies, districtwide initiatives, and revamped curriculums is for amateurs. Continuing to try to make a difference day after day against insurmountable odds is what makes you a professional.
Veteran teachers have infallible radar for distinguishing wannabes from the genuine article. Somewhere during the year, I passed muster, and their unspoken welcome to me as a member of the school community was both touching and sobering for the responsibility it entailed. They, too, believed that I would make a difference.
The research literature is replete with the kinds of support that new teachers need to survive and thrive in their first teaching experience—mentoring, preservice diversity training, extended opportunities for practice teaching, and more time built into the school day for working in collaborative teams.
I missed out on these supports in my first public school teaching endeavor, and I suffered. More progressive school districts have them in place, and I applaud them. But something will still be missing from these new-teacher initiatives unless homage is paid to the inner fires that send people into teaching in the first place. New teachers need mentors and opportunities for professional development, yes, but more important, they need an ongoing celebration of their willingness to struggle and survive through the frustrations and disappointments of first-year teaching. And they need to know that just by surviving, they have made a difference.
I recently left the classroom to take a staff development position that focuses on showing mainstream teachers how to support their English-language learners. In my district, dedicated and talented teachers of English as a Second Language are already making a difference in the lives of their students, and I want to show mainstream teachers how to connect in the same way.
Nevertheless, as the first day of the new school year arrived, I regretted my decision to leave the classroom. I recognized that during the past three years, I had, indeed, made a difference. Because of me, José entered the gifted program and Tomiko's shyness dissipated as her art and poetry blossomed. Because I stepped in, Tran's family obtained insurance to treat her asthma, and Ernesto's family embraced his sense of rhythm and athletic prowess instead of punishing him for being slow to read. Bolivian-born Angela went to the White House at Christmas with a school group and shook hands with the President of the United States. Maimbola learned about taking showers and has new friends. I made these things happen because I was their teacher.
Those who can, teach. Those who teach will make a difference.
