…But Enough About Me

I always thought my path to teaching was unique.

I had two majors in my undergrad years in Syracuse, neither of which involved education of any kind. After graduation, armed with my degrees in tv/radio/film and philosophy, I worked in Los Angeles making reality television shows about cooking, families traveling across country and kids getting “Busted” for things like drinking a Mike’s Hard Lemonade by the creek in their hometown. It wasn’t on anyone’s radar that I would end up teaching in an elementary school classroom. I was the kid that moshed at rock shows and got tattoos without telling my parents. To imagine myself spending my career asking students to “quiet down and turn to page 10” just didn’t seem to fit. But after two years of working in television production, driving over an hour to work only 5 miles away, working a 12 hour shift and turning back around, I wondered what my job meant to me and where I was going.

It took a trip back to Syracuse to get me thinking about education. In 2004, as a freshman, I (as a prerequisite for my dorm) mentored a boy named Yashiem at a local community center. I spent a few hours a week helping him with homework, playing cards with him and took him to an SU basketball game at The Dome. Six years later, while visiting friends in Syracuse, I ran into Yashiem, who happened to be a student in my friend’s drumming class. I was immediately overwhelmed when I saw him. For years I’d thought about him. I’d wondered how he was doing, where he lived, how he liked school. I flew back to LA and started chatting with my roommate about working with children and getting cameras in their hands. I envisioned seeing the world through children’s eyes and using film as a way to encourage students to express themselves and make sense of the world around them. This plan soon turned into dreams of my own classroom and I quickly made plans to return to Syracuse for grad school.

A few months and one missed flight back to the East coast later (oops), I was living in Syracuse, substitute and student teaching, taking a full course load of classes and rolling burritos at Chipotle at night (because I guess I couldn’t stand a few free moments of the day to myself.) I spent a year studying and working full time and soon earned my degree in Childhood Education.

My first job out of grad school took my to Brooklyn where I taught first grade at a union charter school for 4 years. Starting out, I knew I wanted to honor student choice and voice in my classroom, but failed to have the experience or knowledge to truly encourage inquiry-based, student centered work in my space. It was when I met Renee Dinnerstein, who worked as a consultant in our early childhood classrooms, that I began to understand what it meant to engage children in authentic learning. With her guidance, I learned how to take chances with the curriculum I’d been given and started learning to integrate standards and pre-chosen content with long-term, student-driven studies.

I’m now starting my ninth year teaching in Brooklyn. For the past three years I’ve worked in a second/third grade loop at Compass Charter School, which has afforded me and my coworkers the flexibility to teach children in ways that honor them as valuable, knowledgeable and capable beings from the first day they enter our building. This September, I started a new loop with my co-teacher, Britt, with whom I’ve been lucky enough to share a classroom for the past two years.

I talk about my journey to teaching, because I thought it was unique. A TEACHER WHO HAD PREVIOUSLY STARTED ANOTHER CAREER, WHO’D HAVE THUNK?? But the more I talk with teachers in my school and others, the more I hear stories of educators drawn to this profession from another just like I was. The story of a teacher who ended up almost not being a teacher at all isn’t as rare as it seems. I hear about teachers, like myself, who considered a profession in education when they were younger, but for a multitude of reasons, turned the other way and chose another path. For some it was money, or ‘success,’ or the desire to live a life with luxuries not always afforded to teachers. For some it was family pressure and expectations, and for many, it was the state of education of young children that turned away wannabe teachers. That whole “quiet down and turn to page 10” thing doesn’t always resonate with people whose goal is to change the world and inspire children to do the same. Many teachers, I found, had turned away from dreams of teaching because of frustration and disappointment with ‘the system.’ Some, I was happy to find, had found their way back like I did.

In order to draw creative and resourceful teachers back into education, we need an overhaul of the way that learning as a whole is felt both by the student and the teacher. We need to teach through experiences, inside and out of the classroom, that speak to the variety of learners in our spaces and that appreciate and utilize the ingenuity of the teacher as a guide. I hope, for all of the teachers who turned away and never came back, and for those in a classroom but still feeling stuck, that this blog will encourage you to branch out, get creative, and get out of the classroom to teach students in brave, engaging and invigorating ways.

My goal with this blog is to act, as I try in my classroom, to be a facilitator and guide of a larger conversation on education and the importance of genuine student engagement. I hope to reach out to others to learn from their experiences and to share my own strategies for approaching learning outside of the classroom. Every so often I plan to write a post requesting information, advice and experience from others. Our strength as teachers is in our creativity and our willingness to share our strategies with one another. I look forward to posting about my successes, road-blocks and solutions and I hope you’ll do the same!

Katie