First Year Teaching Reflections Part II

I just archived all my classes on Google Classroom from this past year, and I am really starting to process that all those students I spent nearly every weekday with for the last 9 months will no longer be coming into my classroom everyday. I will no longer get see their beautiful smiles or tired attempts at smiling for me as they greet me at the door, and I will no longer hear their lovely voices or curious questions, and I will no longer get to experience their strange antics and weird quirks the way I did for the past 9 months.

This is brutal.

Some people had warned me about how hard it is to send students off every year (especially elementary school teachers who see the same 30 or or so kids for around 7 hours a day for 180 days... although by day 170 elementary school teachers are probably ready to kick those kids out their doors, so maybe elementary school teachers have it easier...), but I was not prepared for how attached I'd get to my kids this year, especially my AP Literature and Composition students.

By the end of my first year, after winging about 30 lessons, actually planning/creating 30 or so for myself, stealing another 30 or so online, and working off of 15+ different units I created, I am convinced of this:

Teaching is all about knowing your students.

Every lesson, every unit, every essential question, everything that goes on in the classroom is based off the relationship a teacher has with each student and the ability to analyze the summation of all relationships in each period to gauge what each class needs. Even though I only had two different preps (ERWC and AP Literature and Composition), I taught 5 different classes based on the ways my students responded to me in each class. This is also why I love teaching. For me, teaching is the art of wooing students to love not the teacher, but the material in the way the teacher presents it. A teacher must rise to the challenge of truly getting to know all students' needs and interests and desires in order to draw them into the content being taught. This is where my greatest strength lies (when people ask me what my strengths are, I love telling people, "I'm a Woo!" because it makes them think I misunderstood their question and am only telling them my last name, haha [and, no, in case the name of my blog wasn't clear enough, I'm not a Wu, I'm a Lin]), and I sincerely believe my first year of teaching was successful because I recognized how to utilize this greatest strength of mine. Lessons go well or not well based on how well the lesson got students to buy into the content based on their level of motivation to connect with the material. The first quarter or even first semester of the school year will be littered with not-so-great lessons because you're still figuring out your kids and what they need and like, but the second semester becomes that much better because you're in the flow of the relationship and you can joke and laugh and cry and be stern with them and they will take it all in the context of that safe space you created for them in your relationship and in your classroom. So, for me, any reflection on any lesson throughout the year is actually a reflection of how well I understood each student and their role in the overall classroom culture in context of the content being taught.

Yes, there were times right before Spring Break when I thought I would literally rather be dead than have to go in my classroom and face my students, and yes, there were a lot of lessons that I knew needed stronger closings or needed to be broken down into multiple days so that my students could grasp the content better (especially my going over some rubrics since I write too much and my rubrics are essentially essays organized into charts which, ultimately, actually made them more confusing... I will have to fix that for next year, especially since I'll be working with 9th graders), but I would not have traded my relationships with my students for any other profession or better pay this past year. It is an honor to have shared in the laughter, tears, confusion, and mess of other emotions with each student I had a real relationship with, and I am proud to say that I am apparently one of some of my students' favorite teachers (their words, not mine), or I at least surprised most of my students in the kind of classroom they ended up in this past year.

Of course, I decided to buy a yearbook of my first year teaching, and of course, I asked my students to sign said yearbook. It got filled pretty fast since this year's yearbook didn't include extra pages for people to leave signatures, but most students ended up writing separate notes and cards anyway. I am also proud to be say my yearbook is filled with so many thoughtful, kind, appreciative words from my students this year that I am fueled to be more creative, meet more students' needs, and be an even better teacher next year!

This student was the first student to come up to me after a long break and say, "I really missed you and your class during break, Mrs. Lin!" I never felt so welcomed back to my classroom. She is known as "sweetheart" to all her other teachers, too. She described herself (and her friends did, too, haha) as "a hot mess," and she lived up to that. But I love her and she still passed my class with a lot of hard work and through difficult life situations I shall not mention here. 

This student (the writing on the bottom; it's really hard to see, though) is one I hope will visit me as often as possible even though she's going to USC (on a full ride, too! I'm so proud!). She really felt like a daughter to me in the class, and she was the first student to whom I said, "I love you." Am I allowed to say that to students?

At first, I thought my student went out and specifically bought monogrammed cards for each of his teachers, but after closer inspection, it turns out he actually cut the letter out of the circle himself! That realization really moved me.

This was the note inside the card. It made me both laugh and cry, and it was actually the perfect summation of my first year of teaching. This student was a stellar writer (which is why it's even funnier that he missed whole phrases when writing the card, haha), and full of the best kind of humor. This kiddo is definitely one I will miss the most.

I hope students don't just write about visiting as a pleasantry, because I would love to see this student again after she gets settled into Berkeley. (: 

Most of these are hard to see due to where the students had to write since there wasn't enough space in my yearbook, but they are mostly for my eyes only anyway. There are tens more of these notes and yearbook messages like these, but each one was just a little different based on the student and the relationship I had with that student. I can honestly say I will miss every single little bugger from my classes this year, even the ones I had rougher relationships with, and I'm going to have a hard time moving on from these first kids to the next batch. It'll get easier every year with practice, right?

Every long-term teacher says that they always remember their first year teaching's students. I believe my first year's students will not be any different. I could tell you a little something about all 142 of my kids this past year, but it would not be a wise thing to post on a somewhat public blog. But I also know that I will do my best to remember every student I teach because, after all, teaching is all about the students, and how can you not remember someone you've built a relationship with after seeing them every weekday for 52 minutes for 180 days? I just hope I keep remembering to build those relationships.

To any students who find my blog out there, know that I will always treasure you and love you!

First-Year Teaching Reflections Part I

This blog started as (and currently still is, I guess) a means to complete a credentialing course assignment. But why should it be only for that purpose? I’ve been meaning to start a blog for my life as a teacher - especially to act as electronic altars, if you will, to remind me of the miracles God has worked in my life through my teaching career, and how He has shown me even in my first year of teaching that this profession is where He has called me in my time on Earth - and claiming this Blogspot name has solidified for me that I should keep writing on this blog while I am a teacher.

What can I even say? First-year teaching is as steep a learning curve as every other teacher tells me. I lost 15 pounds in my first two weeks of teaching due to sleeping only 5 hours a night and eating one meager meal a day while trying to prepare on-the-spot and hopefully-long-term lessons for two senior English sections (AP Literature and Composition alongside Expository Reading and Writing Course), grade 150 college application essays, establish a classroom culture, continue working through and submitting assignments for my credentialing courses because I was still an intern, and attempt to get to know all my students on individual levels in October. "Why so late?" you ask? These poor students had their original teacher for all of one week, and then that teacher decided that she didn't want the job anymore and literally left the school without a word to anyone. Other teachers and my students told me about how they showed up at the door the next morning and waited for 10 minutes before campus security had to go let them in. The students had a slew of substitute teachers for three weeks before my principal hired me after only one interview (granted, I also knew three other teachers at the school, and the three of them put in very good words for me).

Suffice to say, it was a rough first semester (and I didn't even teach in September!). By Winter Break, I and another first-year teacher were commiserating together and empathizing with the teacher I replaced; what would it feel like to just walk away from something this draining and physically damaging without a word and without ever looking back? Would the freedom actually feel freeing? This other first-year teacher is probably one of the main reasons I didn't throw in the towel in January, and that's when I realized that I need other teachers as a teacher. I had a mentor teacher on paper, but he was only signed off by National as my official mentor teacher whilst really doing very little to support me (or other teachers, for that matter), and I had one really close real mentor teacher across the hall (and, by God's grace, I actually met my real mentor teacher over the summer at a conference called Better Together California before I started across the hall from him in October). But I knew that our department needed cohesion for me to thrive here, so I began to take the initiative to get to know all the other teachers in the English department by inviting them to lunches in my mentor teacher's classroom or my own and also initiating after-school hangouts for happy hour or BJ's daily specials (my family members and I are all huge BJ's Brewhouse and Restaurant fans, but I swear we don't own stock in them). Developing real friendships with teacher coworkers also made collaborating more fun and easy, and I can thankfully say that, even though my mentor teacher and the teacher with whom I commiserated after Winter Break are leaving the school and the teaching profession, respectfully, I now have other good teacher friends in the English department and other departments that I can rely on to support me through however long I am at this school.

Now that I've just completed Cycle 2 of my CalTPAs, I've also come to the conclusion that assessment-driven teaching is, in fact, what helps make good teachers. It's also just that good teachers will naturally be informally assessing their students 100% of the time. A look at students' faces in response to a question the teacher asks is an informal assessment. Students' verbal responses to the teacher's questions in class are informal assessments. What students say to one another during pair-share is informal assessment. Quick writes, journals, essays, Socratics, Philosophical Chairs, watching TED talks, the list goes on... everything is an informal assessment for the teacher to constantly gauge the level of comprehension, engagement, and learning progress in the classroom.

Also, now that I've just completed Cycle 2 of my CalTPAs, I am going to let my brain shut off from teaching technicalities and focus on the most rewarding thing about teaching: relationships with students.

Next post will have a lot of pictures and thoughts and be longer (I know, right? How can I possibly make my posts any longer? You don't even know, my friend. You don't even know) because the next post will actually be about my first-year teaching's students.

First Post

Before I began considering a career in teaching, I created a blog titled Workaholism101: Thoughts of an Underworked Workaholic. Only after I started my first year of teaching 5 sections of seniors (Expository Reading and Writing Course ["ERWC" for short] and AP Literature and Composition) did I realize just how appropriate and ironic my blog name was/is.

My subject-area mentor teacher told me before I got my current teaching assignment that "you can only be a good teacher if you have a martyr mindset." Though this is true, and I do have somewhat of a martyr mindset, I have found that you can also be a good teacher if you truly love what and who you teach without needing to kill yourself or sacrifice your family. I was called to teaching by a voice within and without me, and, after my first year of learning and teaching, I know that this is the profession in which I was made to be.

Even though I am a passionate English teacher and lover of grammar (I used to pride myself in being a grammar nazi; these days, I'm not so sure. Teaching 1984 and understanding how Newspeak is at play whether we attempt to use it or not has shown me how ironic that term is), I do believe a picture is worth a thousand words. My students have proven to me that there are often more than a thousand words that go along with the pictures they present in class.

My husband, my (then) 2.5-year-old, and me in a family selfie

I am an ENFJ on the Myers-Briggs personality test, meaning that I am Extroverted, iNtuivite, Feeling, and Judging (https://www.truity.com/personality-type/ENFJ). It is possibly noticeable in the photo, but I am strongest in my extroversion and feeling portions of my personality. I am also a 4 on the Enneagram (https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-4) with a 2 and 7 leaning, and my strengths from the Strengths Finders 2.0 book are belief, woo, developer, communication, and analytical (https://www.leadershipvisionconsulting.com/how-to-understand-the-four-domains-of-strength/).

My passion to see people develop a true sense of self and establish strong relationships that allow them to have fulfilling lives is perfectly meshed with the depths of seeing literature not only as story, but as applications for our lives, society, and the world. The deeply-rooted philosophical, psychological, and historical nature of literary study is as connected to the roots of humanity as humanity itself. Humans have always connected with one another and passed down information through story, and that's exactly what the study of literature is - learning about how stories reflect religion, philosophy, society, ethics, politics, spirituality, and, essentially, the human condition and how to move humanity forward in the best way possible through these stories.

Because I am these personality types, I have seen the ways I incorporate Restorative Justice, Emotional Intelligence, Growth Mindset, and Asset/Strengths-Based Thinking in my classroom dominate over standards and following the timing of curriculum. My goal with every lesson this year was to incorporate Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in every aspect possible so that I could prove to myself I had real relationships with each of my students and was able to help them not just succeed academically, but love learning and find ways to connect English, reading, literature, and what they do and hear and say in the classroom with their everyday lives.

This makes being an English teacher a lot easier, because I not only have an easy time empathizing with my students and remembering to put myself in their shoes (while drawing energy from being around them), I have also learned to empathize with the characters in the literature I teach, helping students to see the connections I see with the characters, and to then find themselves in the different aspects of the heroes and archetypes we see in texts. Hanging behind my desk is a beautiful painted set of words my best friend did for me that I took from one of the AP Literature teachers at a neighboring high school; it says,

Empathy is the highest form of critical thinking

Literature in general is one of my greatest passions. Without empathy, there is no purpose in reading literature, in hearing stories, in being human. To empathize with another person - be they real or made up - is the ability to live outside of our one-dimensional thought processes, our selfish, broken human desires, and to see the world in a holistic view. Our world is fraught with polarized sides and division, and the only hope for true world peace is the ability to put ourselves in other people's shoes and see the world from their perspective without judgment. This starts with hearing other people's stories and being able to place ourselves in them. This starts with learning to read written stories as a reflection of ourselves. This starts in my English classroom.

My greatest hope is that my students learn how to connect with the world just a little better through what we study in class. I sincerely believe that if a student doesn't know why they are doing what they are doing (not just in the classroom, but anywhere) outside of external pressures like grades or parents or making lots of money or simply being noticed for accomplishments then they shouldn't have to do it. I want students to truly find themselves and who they want to be outside of societal pressures through what we study in my classroom, because only then will they be able to learn how to see others with the same lens of self-discovery.