When I first started teaching I thought I would change the world! And, in some ways I did. My Facebook, and Twitter pages now serve as daily monuments to the power of education as I watch former students navigate university admissions, new careers, celebrations, heartbreaks, and even the responsibility of starting families of their own. And I have the satisfaction of knowing that I played at least a tiny role in making their lives just a little bit richer.
However, these students have done much more for me than I ever did for them. They made me more aware, more alive. They made me become a version of myself that I never thought possible.
I offer you my story (so far) as evidence that being a teacher will provide you with the lessons of a lifetime...
I took an untraditional route to the classroom. In college, I changed majors four times, took a year off to live in Europe, and when I finally emerged with a degree, was still hopelessly unclear on what I actually wanted to do. I didn’t have the gall to tell my mother that ‘wandering poet’ was under consideration, so the third time she asked, I casually mentioned teaching. I had already received my first experience with teaching in Europe, where I held a part-time job teaching English to Italian teens. I had received very little direction from the organization that hired me, and in less than a week I was ushered into a classroom full of pubescent young Romans more anxious to learn about my American life than the monotonous rules of the English language. Teaching them was an instant love affair for me. Pleasant memories of fun afternoons full of laughter, earnest inquiries regarding the Real Slim Shady, and Italian sodas sealed my decision to become a teacher. One month later I was in an alternative certification program. Six months later, I had my own classroom.
Unfortunately for me, East Dallas was nothing like Italy. I spent the night before the first day of school desperately trying to scrape together enough tables and chairs for day one. I was proud that I had managed to find 22 chairs, until all 34 members of my first period class arrived. Some students sat on the floor, a few sat on tables. And then, almost on cue, the roof began to leak on a student’s new, back-to-school-special haircut. Some kids laughed, most looked scared, and they all looked at me. It was their very first day of sixth-grade, in a new school, and they were counting on me to do something. They needed me to fix it. I sprang into action, agilely navigating wet students among the collection of odd shaped tables with edges that jutted in curious directions. Within an instant, I found my voice, my teacher voice, my own voice, my poise, and I became an adult capable of taking charge, multi-tasking, making quick decisions, and making things better for the people who relied on me. Even though I was 24, this new found responsibility and accountability to children who needed the help were entirely responsible for completing my final stage of the metamorphosis from college student to adult.
My young adulthood mirrored my teaching career, a time of discovery that led to rich new experiences. Personally, I held a new found freedom and responsibility living alone in the middle of a big city, discovering new cuisine, art, music, and love. In the same way, my classroom became a creative launchpad for ways to increase student understanding. Sometimes I would teach the same lesson six different ways, changing variables for every group of students who entered my room. The creative license was hypnotic and I soon became mesmerized with finding unique ways to assist students in mastering difficult concepts. I turned a lesson on Newton’s three laws into a soccer game on the patio where every athletic action had to be accompanied by shouting out the corresponding law it explained. Chemistry lessons became opportunities to make ice cream in plastic bags and shoot rocket ships powered by Alka-Seltzer tablets. My district benchmark test scores showed that the students were learning science, and I was learning creative problem solving.
The lessons didn’t just end with instruction. Our campus was in the middle of a neighborhood with very high rates of crime, poverty, and drug use. The students were testaments to the best and worst in the community. I listened to their stories of bravely traveling to a new country and their shock of being received into overcrowded homes shared by multiple families who had made the same journey and were now crammed into the same holding pattern. I listened to their stories of abuse, sometimes due to violent alcoholic or drug addicted parents, sometimes due to the greed of an adult intent on stealing their innocence, always heartbreaking. I also listened to the pride in their voices as they described their families, their culture, the dreams that they shared with their parents of a brighter future. As I listened, I internalized their pain and their hope. I was fighting my own late-twenties blues, mired in undiagnosed depression, mounting student loan debt, and my own expectations of being happily married by 27. I was 28, alone, and like my students, learning to fight for a dream.
In my third year of teaching, I began to have second thoughts. The emotional toll of internalizing my students’ pain, my own mental health challenges combined with new, less-effective leadership in my school had me ready to call quits on a career I loved. Right before I sent my resignation letter I began to reflect on some of my most inspiring students. Students who against all odds excelled in a new country, with a new language, to become the first member of their family to not only graduate from high school but also to attend college. Students who attended school every day, with a smile, even when their lights were off at home and the refrigerator was empty. Students who laughed when most would have cried and shrugged when most would have screamed. Students who chose to persevere instead of giving up.
And I realized that I must use their strength to find my own.
It has been seven years since I made the decision to continue my career in education. I used my disappointments with the education system as motivation to complete my Master’s degree in Education and transition from the classroom to administration. I now proudly serve as an assistant principal at a large comprehensive high school in the famed south Dallas neighborhood known as Oak Cliff. My foyer into educational leadership perfectly paralleled with my personal life experiences, as I first became a newly-wed, and soon after, a first-time mother. As an assistant principal, I now have the privilege of watching a new generation of young teachers teach and learn their own lessons as they carefully balance the joys and challenges of life with the joys and challenges of the classroom.
And I too am still learning from students. For example, as a woman of color, I daily navigate spaces that were not created for me. I often feel the need to defend my integrity, my intelligence, and my intent as I struggle to be seen as an individual and not a stereotype. At certain times, I have found the scrutiny overwhelming. And precisely at these times, I desire the comfort of the classroom where I stand before students to teach a lesson, and inevitably receive lessons in return. And so, precisely at these times, I trade my office for a classroom, my desk for an expo marker and whiteboard, and I head to a classroom anxious to both teach and learn.
Kae Anderson is an Assistant Principal at Molina High School in Dallas ISD. You can contact her at .
