Month: May 2021

Bleed Purple, Sweat Gold

In a non-pandemic year that corner at 175th & Northcote would be packed with kids in the morning.

Mental Field Trip time: The decision had been made to come back home to the Region from Vegas. Now there was the small matter of finding a job. I’d put in my applications at a few Lake County districts, places I thought I might fit after a lifetime living in the Region and two years of teaching in the nation’s fifth-largest school district. One morning before school (two hour time difference, right?) I get a phone message from the principal’s secretary at a green leafy suburban school (my high school’s big rival growing up) that made it sound like OMG we need to interview you for a job like right now. I spent all day at school thinking about how that interview would go. A day or two of phone tag went by, then radio silence. I finally got a chance to talk to her on Monday. She was gentle about it, but in three days the situation went from “How soon can you get here?” to “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

I think they found someone more local. So, cross that one off the list. Maybe I need to expand my search a little. Yes. Let’s do that.

Then: What about Hammond? The district where my mom worked for 28 of her 30 years in the business. Sure, I can see myself there. We’ll complete the online application and see what happens.

Couple days later a phone call from the principal at one of the School City of Hammond’s four high schools. She didn’t have anything, but another school did. She referred me to the principal at Gavit High School. Phone call -> interview set up -> book a flight. There was mutual interest. Got an offer before we finished talking. Accepted on the spot.

That was 16 years ago.

And it’s days away from ending.

Everything ends, eventually. I’m definitely in the second half of my teaching career. I thought a little bit last spring about where I wanted to spend that second half. Choose wisely.

Then: What about Hammond?

Yeah. With my kids, and my teacher friends. The IRL kind.

My principal at Gavit was selected to be the new principal at Morton after the consolidation. She was willing to let me take risks, and try out whatever wacky idea I found on Math Teacher Twitter, and grow as a teacher, learning from successes and failures. That’s worth changing jobs for. Even at a hometown discount. So here we are. For the Last Dance.

Parenthetically: Next August will be far from the first time I’ve walked through the doors at Morton though.

Plus a million PDs, and district convocations, and South Shore e-Learning Conferences, and basketball games back in my radio play-by-play days. Undoubtedly I’ve spent more time at Morton than any other school in Hammond except Gavit.

With the pandemic and remote teaching for three quarters of the year, it feels like we really just started. And then one day in the midst of Final Exam Review I looked at the date and realized there were single-digit days left. Not only in the school year, but in the existence of this school. How did that happen?

Not gonna lie, the day I walked back in the building to pick up my room keys I had a silly grin on my face as I walked the halls. Everything looked like home. Memories came flooding back. Then I taught from my dining room table for eight months. I’ve been soaking it all in day-by-day in the couple months since then. But there is a little more urgency now.

I’m not the longest-tenured teacher there. Or the teacher most involved in coaching and clubs. Or, let’s be honest, the best teacher. Lots of folks have more claim to Gavit than I do. But the memories are all mine.

So I spend a lot of time thinking these days. And remembering.

The kids. All the kids – My first year in the building, doing some kind of math in class one day, my kids were trying to get a get a sense of what I was doing here, and how long I would stay. I said, “Man, they’re gonna have to take me out of here in a body bag.” And a student replied, “One way or another.” That’s so Region. I knew that day I was in the right place. Did I tell you about the guy who used to bring a hacky sack to school? He’d stop by my room and we’d play in the hall during passing time. Or the kid who showed up in a bald wig and a button-down shirt on “Dress Like A Teacher” Day? Or the one who looked up from her math work one day in class when Band of Horses was playing on Pandora: “Mr. Dull, that’s so emo! Do you need to talk?” Or the ones who dove right in when we decided to use math to figure out if that video of Kobe jumping over an Aston Martin was real? Or the ones who decided to use all my classroom catchphrases as screen names during a Kahoot review? Or the one who wrote the note in the header photo of this little blog? I stay connected with a lot of my former students on social. They are all doing great things. Working hard, raising families, defending our country, making things, fixing things, teaching small humans, teaching not-so-small humans, celebrating moments with friends. So many died too soon. I remember them all with love. Even the ones that made me crazy.

My Lunch Bunch – There were a couple years when I just did not want to see another human being at lunch. I ate in my room every day. Lonely, but peaceful. Then one year I decided to stop being anti-social and come down to the teacher lounge to eat. Best decision I ever made. The teachers who ate together every day are some of my best friends in the building. In addition to being incredibly talented and caring teachers and human beings. They always knew the right thing to say. We’re working on a collaborative “Gavit Farewell” playlist and I’m super-interested to see what everyone adds. I’ll put it on repeat all summer long.

Friday Spirit Days – I kept all my spiritwear on a shelf in my closet when I went to teach in another district for little bit. Good thing.

Some of my favorites

Homecoming Pep Rallies – The gym was never as loud as those Friday afternoons. Love wacky games and dueling graduation-year chants and a drumline, man.

Turkey Bowl – Students vs. faculty in flag football as a Natural Helpers fundraiser. Each team had to have an even male/female split on the field. So those years we had a former college softball player as a science teacher who was a better athlete than any of the girls and probably 90% of the boys. Yep, we got ourselves a quarterback.

The OG Turkey Bowl shirt. Number 42, reporting.

The counting game – I take a minute at the start of our year-opening faculty meeting to count how many teachers (and staff) who were in the room with me the year I started. It’s 21 this year. Out of 100 or so teachers in the building. We’re lifers.

Subbing for my friends – Like many districts we have a perpetual shortage of subs, so I could count on once a week or so getting called on to cover a class during my plan period. Those were cool days when I’d see my math students, past or present, in an English or science or Chinese class. And get to dazzle them with knowledge I last used probably on the SAT. Also: this is where those relationships really paid off. That day that two of my students got in an argument over which one was my favorite. Then the perfect squelch: “Oh yeah? Did he give you a nickname?”

Rebecca Black – There’s a vibe to Friday that you can either fight, or roll with. I’m gonna ride the wave all the way in. Thus the Friday Playlist was born. We’re gonna learn today. But we might dance first.

The Borman – 15 minutes of white knuckle rides, windows down, music up, either to get ready for the day, or decompress from the day. You haven’t really lived until you’ve gone 75 down a 4-lane expressway boxed in between a steel hauler and a tanker truck. Ideal place to knock out a Rosary, my own personal Litany of Saints, and a St. Michael prayer.

South Shore E-Learning Conference – #sselearn is Hammond’s entry into the Indiana DOE’s Summer of e-Learning series. Learn from teachers, share my learning, see my friends from across the district and across the Region, make new ones. We should do this again sometime. You know, after the pandemic is over and that sort of thing is allowed. Recaps here, here, here, and here.

Air conditioning – When I got here, there wasn’t any. Following the lead of my mentor teacher, I was a shirt & tie guy in Vegas. Walked into my classroom the first day, on the third floor of a 50-year-old building and went “nope”. Tossed the tie into the closet and haven’t worn one to school since.

The view of the neighborhood out my window – In the distance we can watch storms roll in off the lake. And when the wind turns from the north we can smell the coke plant at the steel mill where my dad worked for 40 years.

Hello, Woodmar

The sunsets – Here’s a thousand words’ worth. Sometimes in December I used to leave school late on purpose just to see the sunset over the football field.

Next Friday is the teacher work day. We’ll knock out our punch list for end-of-year, check out, and walk out the door for the final time. Maybe stop by the end of the year celebration with my fellow teachers. We’ll laugh and tell stories and go home. I’m gonna teach summer school, and then a bunch of us will be on staff together at Morton High School in the fall. For the start of a new adventure.

I’ll eventually love being a Governor as much as I love being a Gladiator.

But for now I’m just gonna sit with the memories for a while.

Lost and Found

You wanna start a fight online these days, start talking about “learning loss” on Twitter.

Source

There’s plenty of smart folks talking about it. Here’s a McKinsey report based on a survey of teachers. And The Atlantic’s take. And an article from the New York Times. And dozen more are a quick online search away.

The general consensus from the articles is yes, there’s going to be plenty of gaps. The concern is, do we use that fact to justify more testing, more tracking, more remediation, or is there a better way to do it? And how will that affect the mental health and future prospects for our students, particularly our students of color?

My former school, during the early days of the shutdown, adopted a “power standards” approach – what topics do we need to cover now because they form the foundation for learning in their next class in the fall? And write that down because we need to know for next year.

Other districts presented no new material from mid-March on. Ten weeks of review. Either way, the curriculum map was shot full of holes. And my school this year was remote for three quarters, then hybrid the remainder of the year, adopting a 4×4 block schedule with Friday e-learning days. So we had 160 minutes of live teaching and learning a week, plus a Friday independent activity, compared to 250 minutes of seat time in a non-pandemic week.

So, confirming the articles cited earlier, regardless of district there were standards that just were not presented in class.

That’s an issue. One of the great perks of changing my assigned course every few years is that I have a pretty good idea of what my students were exposed to last year, and what they’ll need for next year. But now, I don’t really know what they saw last year for sure.

Is it a matter of how to define “learning loss”? Stuff they didn’t learn because we didn’t cover it , or stuff they didn’t learn, even though we did cover it, because remote learning was hard and being able to ask questions was a lot tougher. And how much, if at all, will that hurt their chances for success in class next year?

But I also know that even the stuff we teach in a normal year doesn’t necessarily stick. I’m reminded of a really strong student in my Geometry class a couple years ago (pre-pandemic, so in-person). A spiral review early in the year featured a quadratic to solve. She called me over and said “I have no idea what to do with this”. The brain-mouth filter was fully engaged so all this stayed in my head, but my first thought was, “Seriously? You got an A in Algebra I and this is one of the most important topics in the whole class and that was legit only like four months ago”. I helped her see that the equation included an x-squared term, reminded her of the multiple ways we had of solving quadratics, and she was back on track.

Reflecting on that moment at the end of the day, I was pretty chill. I mean, as grown-ups we don’t always clearly remember things we learned once, four months ago, so why would a 16-year-old?

So let;s teach it again.

And I’m reminded of a moment in my student-teaching days, when I taught Algebra IB and Intuitive Geometry. The 1B course was the second year of a two-year cycle for students who weren’t on grade-level to take Algebra I as freshmen. The district split the course into two – the first year we did the first half of the book, six chapters in nine months. Then in year two we started over from the beginning and did the entire book. That geometry course used to be called “Non-College-Bound Geometry”, and it went a little lighter on proofs and a little heavier on applications. The Algebra 1B students pretty typically would be scheduled into Intuitive Geometry the following year as juniors.

So we’re plowing through a worksheet one day (you know the kind, where the dimensions of some object are given as algebra expressions), and my kids are getting frustrated. Finally one looks up and says, “Mr. Dull, why do they give worksheets full of algebra to kids they already know can’t do algebra?”

High school students are very perceptive. Always have been.

But that’s why, right? Keep practicing, keep teaching, keep getting reps, get them to pass the Proficiencies. And the next thing you know, you can do algebra.

So I imagine that is where we are heading. There is a move afoot in my district to extend the school year and build in remediation and enrichment during fall and spring breaks. Which yeah, it’s needed, even before the pandemic. But I’m not sure an optional week twice a year is the most efficient way to do it.

If anything it probably underscores the need for constant spiral review, bringing last year forward. Daily bellringer? SAT prep question? Estimation 180 and 101qs? Something. I’m hatching a plot to pitch my teaching neighbor (and geometry collaborator next year) on building a set of bellringers and Friday (mini-classes of 40 minutes each) tasks for next year. He’s open to the idea.

There’s no shortage of source material. I’ve taught algebra since the days of overhead projectors and I’ve got a stack of retired textbooks and supplemental materials. Plus, 21st century, so there’s Problem-Attic and Kuta and Quizizz and a million other places to find practice problems.

I don’t have a doctorate. I haven’t studied the research on the issue. I only know what my students need from me. I don’t know the solution. I do know we’ve got a little bit of time to think about it.

Maybe this talk of learning loss has us trying to re-invent the wheel and call out the National Guard in response, when instead the best practices that we’ve used for years are sitting right there. Do the best we can do, with what we have. Our option.

I’m open to the conversation.

Not-So-Senior Ditch Day

Driving back from an anniversary weekend/puppy adventure/Sunday Funday afternoon in Michigan, we saw a Jeep full of exhausted-looking high-school-aged kids exiting the eastbound Borman. We looked at each other and said, “afterprom, right?” Like, no way those kids are going to be functional in school tomorrow…

I had instant flashbacks to Six Flags and Sox Park, the top two destinations for prom weekend fun at my school back in the day. Turkey Run was big back then too, but kind of a haul. Packed a lot into that weekend.

A few moments later, shifting gears mentally to preparing for Monday and the start of the school week, all the dots connected themselves.

It’s America’s favorite parlor game: How Will What We Learned During the Pandemic Change Teaching?

There’s some big structural things that, hoo boy, I don’t know, maybe? More 4C’s, more blended learning, more asynchronous opportunities, more discovery, more support for physical and emotional needs. That’s a whole ‘nother set of posts for people way smarter than me.

But starting small:

Since the dawn of time, my district has used Presidents Day as a snow makeup day, and then just tagged the rest on to the end of the year. (Except that one year we had so many days to make up we got a waiver from the state to make up the time by extending the school day for an hour a day for a month, in addition to tacking a bunch of days on in mid-June.)

Staff gift at the end of that school year. Because teachers run on caffeine and wry humor. Photo cred: me.

My sons’ school district builds in makeup days in the spring, and if they don’t get used they turn in to “sunshine days”. I always thought it was bizarre that my oldest had these random days off in April and May. I mean, it’s cool and they are a nice treat, just, it’s a different way of doing things.

And as a teacher in the midst of that long slog between spring break and Memorial Day, I was secretly a bit envious.

I was introduced to the concept of a “Mental Health Day” in my first year by a fellow early-career teacher. Back then I thought it was just a clever turn of phrase. I learned soon enough that they are critical to long-term success, like Johnny Carson taking Mondays off or a cheat day on a diet or a cutback week during marathon training. You’re not gonna make it to the end in one piece otherwise. And then I read Relentless Pursuit, and the Locke teachers (the good ones) swore by them.

If it’s good by an NBCT, it’s good by me. So, could we break up that nine or ten weeks between spring break and Memorial Day? What if there was a senior ditch day for teachers? After the last 15 months, doesn’t sound so off-the-wall now, does it. As one of my teacher connects pointed out this week, it would be a built-in mental health day just when it’s desperately needed.

Sounds like a job for the calendar committee. Committees, right?

(As an aside, I was kind of surprised when I heard the details of a calendar committee meeting in another district as they weighed a three-day vs. four-day Fall Break. A few years prior the district had peeled off one of those Fall Break days in exchange for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. A no-brainer as far as I’m concerned. But folks really wanted that Pumpkin-spiced four day weekend. A great compromise was reached by trading out the Monday after spring break. So, Solomon, basically).

Could this be one of the things that gets scheduled intentionally? May is shot full of exceptions to the daily routine anyway, field trips and AP testing and prom and ditch day and senior honors day and other things. Every time you turn around you are tweaking plans or moving a quiz or something. Part of the challenge of teaching is juggling these random days off when you are trying to simultaneously finish covering your content and begin reviewing for finals.

But…

What if we built schools for the humans inside of them? Even in little ways like a random day off in May. I’d even give up a day off Fall Break.

Weko on an unseasonably warm January day a few years ago. Also: make me.

Be Portable

I’m a long-time proponent of the go bag, metaphorically speaking. If I had to bug out, what do I need to tide me over until I get settled in? What can I do without?

The teacher version of the go bag isn’t nearly as dramatic. What’s the minimum I need to take with me to set up a classroom? Maybe you’re on a cart due to construction. Maybe you’re changing districts and mindful of what materials in your classroom are “yours”. I spent a year with my “classroom” contained in a 9x12x8 plastic container. And I have a basement full of boxes containing 13 years of teaching stuff.

I think every now and then of a suggestion from Alice Keeler – if you are making your own materials, create everything in your personal Google account, then share to your school account. That way, when you change districts, you are the owner of everything you made and you can just share it to your new district account.

Then this week this tweet from one of my district instructional coaches hit my TL.

That tool would have come in handy about this time last year.

On multiple occasions this year I found myself rebuilding some resources that I no longer have access to.

Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Like the old saying goes: Teach 20 years, fine, but don’t teach one year 20 times.

This spring I re-used my NCAA Brackets probability activity and my Monty Hall Problem investigation for the first time since pre-pandemic. Since I wrote about them back in the day I had a link to the slide deck, but I no longer had access to the forms and had to rebuild those from memory.

How’d it go? Not perfect (what ever is) but I’ll take it.

So we definitely set the hook. Major hat tip to the people at Numberphile who put together an excellent explainer video:

Looking back I wish I would have asked my students specifically to cite a difference between theoretical probability and experimental probability in this activity. But several of them got the basic idea.

But I also had kids who were convinced that the math, even when explained by experts and confirmed by a simulation, was not correct.

(And honestly, I get that. I tell my students often that every math teacher they have ever had, once had a math class that was completely incomprehensible to them. For me it was C++. Once we got to writing functions, I was hopelessly lost. Nothing the instructor, or my classmates, or my own Googling around could unstick me.

That keeps me grounded, especially back in the early days when I’d just finished taking rocket science math, third semester of calculus taught by a giant bearded Romanian, then a couple months later I’m teaching kids who struggled to find slope of a line. Don’t sweat what they can’t do yet. I’m a teacher, right? That’s the whole job, to teach them what they don’t know. And if at all possible, have fun while doing it.)

I’m switching subject areas again next year, back to Geometry, in a new building, with a staff combined from two schools. Seems like a good time to pack my go bag with my best Geometry stuff (and everybody else’s) and be ready to rebuild the rest. I’m already bouncing ideas off my down-the-hall neighbor and as of next year, fellow Geometry teacher.

It feels like rebuilding from the ground up sometimes. But honestly, that can be healthy. As it relates to teaching philosophy, and to lesson design.

I was reminded the other day that when I made the switch to geometry a couple years ago I had more people offering me their own personal stuff than I could have ever imagined.

That’s the best part: Strength in numbers. It’s good to have people. Better than any go bag item I can think of.

Honor Your Mother and Father

I’ve said for years that teaching in Hammond is kind of the family business. Here’s the OG SCH employee in the family:

Thirty years serving the kids of Gary, East Chicago, and Hammond. She was a school nurse but she had the “teacher look” which I later learned is kind of indistinguishable from the “mom look”.

I was the age my oldest son is right now when my mom passed. And after all that time her lessons are still pretty fresh. Some things she said out loud. A lot of this I learned by watching. If you’ll indulge my reverie, I’ll share them with you:

  • From the moment we are born we begin to die. (In case you wondered how I got all #MementoMori).
  • Don’t ever walk around without health insurance.
  • When you are thinking about making a purchase, don’t just think about the price tag. Think about how many hours you needed to work to earn the money to buy that thing. Now, is it still worth it?
  • Do your homework. Get the knowledge (and credential) to do the thing you want to do.
  • Things you don’t know how to cook, you can learn. In a cookbook on a shelf I have my mom’s handwritten copies of my dad’s recipes that he gave her on his deathbed. I’ve tweaked most of them a little but I still know where they came from and why I have them.
  • If your kids are away at college (or living on their own), yes, send the care package full of cookies and taco meat and chop suey. (She also sent a manual can opener labeled in black ink on white tape “M. Dull”, which is how she became known to my college roomies as “Ma Dull”).
  • Serve others. Her service didn’t come from a position of privilege. I didn’t get this until I was older and I knew more of her story, but as an orphan, an adoptee, a widow, and a single mom, she knew what it felt like to get knocked down over and over, and to have people willing to lend a hand up.
  • The Catholic faith is real and true. But you can’t just claim it, you have to live it.
  • Pray the Rosary.
  • Tell your kids the things they need to hear. Especially the hard things.
  • Be there for them when they make bad decisions.
  • Be willing help them out when they face hard times.
  • Your kids’ spouses need your love.
  • It’s OK to splurge on important occasions.
  • If you pay for things on time, be sure to make the payments on time. Even after we moved I vividly remember driving to Schoenberg’s Furniture in East Chicago to make a cash payment on some piece we had bought.
  • Travel. Especially outside the US.
  • Go see your siblings. (In her biological family she was one of 12, then she was adopted into a family where she was the older sister to two boys. There were plenty of aunts and uncles to visit in Cincinnati, LA, DC, Denver, elsewhere).
  • It’s good to come home.

I recall once when I was little hearing about Mothers Day and Fathers Day, and asking “when is Kids’ Day?” with all the innocent curiousity of youth. My mom, in all her wisdom, said, “Every day is kids’ day”.

True. Which is why I rely on her as an intercessor often for my own kids. She was buried on the Feast of the Assumption from Our Lady of Grace Church, at rest in St. Mary’s Cemetery so I’m quite sure she is close to the Blessed Mother.

She’ll pray for you too. I guarantee it.

Happy Mothers’ Day.

Mom and the future Mrs. Dull, way back when. Two of my favorite saints.

Where Are They Now?

A little over 10 years ago a college classmate of my wife approached her with an idea she had for a STEM mentoring program matching middle school girls with professionals in our local area. It was a bit ahead of its time and after a brief moment of glory the non-profit closed. But in the “anything-is-possible” days in the early going when they were dreaming of a statewide, and then national, program, the founders were benchmarking (among other organizations) Teach For America. Which is how I ended up reading Donna Foote’s 2008 book Relentless Pursuit.

Back in the day I read it once a year about the time that teaching started to suck. I was looking for… what? Comfort? Someone to share misery with? I don’t know. I was older than the teachers in the book, with a different background, and my school did not face nearly the challenges as Locke High School. But I had to know that someone was struggling like I was struggling.

I re-read it this year with a different motivation. One I’m having a hard time putting a finger on, but different. More positive. It lifted me up a little.

The book, by a former Newsweek writer and Southern California resident, tracks the first year for a cohort of Teach For America core members at Locke High School in Watts. We meet Hrag Hamalian and Rachelle Snyder and Phillip Gedeon and Taylor Rifkin, and their principal Frank Wells and administrator and TFA alum Chad Soleo, and their program director (coach) Samir Bolar. The story plays out during the early days of the charter school movement. In fact, an LA-based charter organization was making a bid to take Locke off the LA Unified’s hands during the years the book takes place.

Even the first read I felt I knew this group. I could hear their voices, feel their anguish and their jubilation from day-to-day in class, see the graffiti on the walls and the gang colors openly displayed, picture their classrooms and the campus and the off-site Friday “therapy” sessions, the late nights lesson planning and the mornings when they’d rather do anything but go in to school.

TFA has long stated that the real impact of the program will be felt when alumni are school leaders and district-level administrators and legislators and policy-makers.

Over the summer, under an umbrella with a bowl of fruit & tajín and a cold drink, I wondered what the protagonists are doing now. Still teaching? Leadership? Policy? Something else entirely?

So I started Googling around.

I’d actually searched Hamalian before. By the end of the book he had already laid out plans to work towards runinng his own school. He’s now the Executive Director of Bright Star Schools in LA.

Philliip Gedeon was considered one of the top math teachers, one of the top teachers period, at Locke halfway through his first year. He too had his sights set on school leadership. He is now Chief of Schools for Leadership Public Schools in Oakland.

Rifkin and Snyder were a little harder to track down. But Soleo found a home in the charter organization that took over Locke. He’s now CEO of Green Dot National.

Zeus Cubias, the Locke graduate who later taught at his alma mater, also made the move to Green Dot and is now an educational consultant.

Frank Wells is superintendent of the Alameda school district in California. It seems like a fitting end to a career for a guy who ended up being kind of a punching bag in the book. I don’t know if you’d call it a “soft landing”, but he’s earned it.

One guy I couldn’t find, and knew I wouldn’t be able to, was Roberto, the leader of the student walk-out. To protect the identity of minors, Foote did not publish last names, but his story was compelling. She pointed out that he was an actor and star of the track team as well as a stellar student who had earned acceptance into the University of California system. I’d love to know where he is now. I can vouch that even in schools where there are headwinds to student success, elite students make their way in the world.

My first read of Relentless Pursuit coincided with the start of The Search. When I was trying to figure out a better way to teach, because what I was doing was not working. I read a ton of TFA & KIPP stuff and found some things I thought made sense. So now, 10 years on, where am I?

Wells’ story sticks in the back of my mind. He was pulled in a million different directions, trying to keep his school safe, parents assured, higher-ups satisfied, and various factions of teachers supported. It highlighted why I’ve never considered educational leadership. I’m not cut out for it. The skillset required for success is one I don’t remotely possess.

I’ve seen some very overmatched administrators, and I’ve seen some exceptional leaders. I’ve seen that stereotypical young teacher seeking a way out of the classroom get eaten alive by the job.

But it’s just not for me.

Fortunately there is a pathway in modern-day times for a teacher to take on a leadership role (formal or informal) and remain in the classroom. I feel like my role is to share what I have learned, keep learning from my colleagues (both online and IRL) and continue my personal growth as a teacher. The “grizzled old veteran” I guess.

Also, I saw the salaries for the administrators at a previous school district recently, and hoo boy, not only could you not pay me enough to do that job, you could for sure not pay me that number to do that job.

I’m a classroom teacher, and that’s all I’ll ever be.

So this is a long-winded way to say I’m at peace. Like Moonlight Graham. “I was born here, I lived here, I’ll die here. No regrets.” Those TFA teachers at Locke in the book were go-getters from the jump. They saw themselves as levers for change on a grand scale. It’s what led them out of the classroom to seek positions of power. And that’s fine. I don’t need a new job title to validate my career.

Shoot, they just posted the department chair positions for the consolidated school I’ll be teaching at next year, and I didn’t bat an eye. Why would I think I should try to jump over the current DCs at the two schools that will be folded together? As I told one of my teaching besties early this school year, “I’m not special”. Look, I didn’t come back here to change the world.

I just need to do what I do best.

But my Twitter bio doesn’t say “stubbborn jackass” for nothing. I’ll still be in relentless pursuit of the teacher my students need me to be.