I shared three inventories (love language, personality, and strengths) in my last two posts that have brought some clarity to my life. It’s enlightening and useful to think through some specifics about why one “ticks” the way one “ticks”. It’s given me food for thought on how to more effectively navigate my life, knowing my tendencies and “social graces” that require intentional effort (and prayer) on my part.
The inconsistency has not escaped me: How did a non-words of encouragement, lion, beaver, achiever, focus, learner, relator, deliberative, non-woo function for 14 years in a first grade classroom? I’ve actually given it much thought.
The majority of pre-service teachers who came into my classroom for observations and student teaching would say in some form or fashion, “I want to teach because I love kids.” That wasn’t me. In fact, I hadn’t been around young children at all when I was 19. I babysat RARELY and looking back I confess that I wasn’t very enthusiastic about it when I did. I have twin sisters who were five years younger than me, and while I love them dearly and consider them to be two of my very best friends, I did not make time for them when I was in high school. I was much too busy with my much too important life (tongue in cheek).
I’ve often heard a combination of, “I love playing with kids, making crafts, decorating bulletin boards, and planning parties,” over the years. That wasn’t me either.
I can’t tell you exactly how I ended up in elementary education. In fact, education was my third declared major. Initially, I enrolled in the ENMU music therapy program. After struggling through music theory my first semester, I knew additional theory classes would have equated to collegiate suicide.
I transferred to Howard Payne University after my first year at ENMU. The Douglas MacArthur Academy of Freedom at HPU offered a fantastic scholarship opportunity for students who double majored in the Academy’s inter-disciplinary social sciences program and their chosen path. I had taken two psychology classes my freshman year at ENMU and liked them well enough to registered at HPU as an Academy/Psychology double major. I’m not sure how I moved from psychology to elementary education, but I remember liking my developmental psychology classes.
My father was a high school band director. His long hours and low pay led me to swear as a teen that I would never teach. Even when I decided to major in education, 1st grade never crossed my mind. I loved my history and political science classes at The Academy and planned to work with middle school and junior high students. I thought I could motivate children to love American History as I had grown to love it.
My first two years of teaching, I taught 5th grade social studies and science in Waco, Texas. I taught in a poverty stricken neighborhood. It was an eye-opening experience. While teaching in Waco, I started my Med at ENMU, thinking that administration would be my ultimate career, and when I’d completed all that I could during summers on campus and through “correspondence” I moved back to Portales.
I accepted a position teaching “Title I Reading”, pulling 2nd and 3rd grade students out of their classrooms for 30 minute tutoring sessions. I was unprepared for teaching a child to read but I enjoyed the challenge and had begun to see that I could make a difference in a child’s academic progress through consistency, well prepared lessons and analysis.
In 1999 I was asked to consider a professional development opportunity that would require considerable travel, time, and training. After 1 year in Portales, I was still low man on the totem pole. I didn’t know that I could have said, “No thank you, I’d rather not,” and the challenge of a new opportunity appealed to me. My training year in Reading Recovery® and a change in my assignment from 3rd to 1st grade led to the discovery of my niche.
For 14 years I taught first grade children to read. The final three were spent in a Dual Language classroom where I often had a child appear at 8:00am straight from Mexico without a word of English. I couldn’t have asked for a more meaningful assignment. I know that I made a difference, and even on the most difficult days, I loved the actual time on task problem solving and teaching children.
Teaching changed significantly in the 17 years I taught. It was never nor is it now an easy job. Students in a classroom run the gamut of extremes in income and living conditions, achievement, behavior, and motivation, and the political climate is enough to make any teacher hang up the lesson plans. In the classroom it often feels, politically, that teachers can’t win for losing. 50 hours a week, piles of paperwork, and entitlement that too often pits the teacher as the enemy is disheartening, to say the very least, and needless to say, it certainly kept me challenged, focused, and intense day after day.
Franklin would occasionally come into my classroom. When he walked in to grab something I would smile and wave but we rarely talked. To be honest, I just didn’t have time to stop. I was reading with a small group, taking a running record with an individual child, prompting the class through word work, or helping a child think through a tricky spot in math with a picture or our classroom “thinking tools”. I often heard from visitors, and Franklin said it many times, “I couldn’t do your job.”
The end of the year was always exciting for me as I considered the growth of every child. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to serve the students I worked with. I believe that every child who ever landed on my roster was in my room for a reason. For a very specific reason, that child was given to me for 180 days. For 180 days I made a powerful difference in the lives of each of my precious kids. Our classroom might not have been a woo-hoo classroom, but it was the classroom of a lion, beaver, achiever, focus, learner, relator, deliberative who learned over the years that a little bit of golden retriever, otter, and “woo” was necessary along the way.