My 17th year as a teacher
This 2022 - 2023 school year is the 17th year in my teaching career. I read once on a blog that your first five years of teaching, you're just struggling to survive and learn to swim. And then 5 - 10 years in, you grow into who you are as a teacher. And then eventually when you reach your 11th year, you start to flourish.
It's astounding to me to look back to think I'm in my 17th year already. And I'll shamefully admit that for the first 13 or so years, I worked on being an amazing high school science teacher. (And I was a well-loved, well accomplished, science teacher indeed!) Once in a while, I'd volunteer to be a class advisor, and then I'd retreat back to my classroom.
But all of that changed with COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. I didn't know how to process the change to online virtual teaching, and I threw myself into countless HOURS of online professional development, and I sat through so many webinars, and attended every app and software program introduction courses available online. I think according to my official end-of-year documentation, I participated in 150 hours of online training between March and June 2020. George Floyd of May 2020 and the Black Lives Matter movement that followed that Summer 2020, led me to joining multiple anti-racist book clubs, and an awakening to the importance of the social justice movement.
In 2020, I suddenly became the "expert teacher" on online learning, because I'd researched everyone online app and software program - ones for teachers to make lecture videos, ones for teachers to engage students, one for students to write and collaborate, how to gamify lessons, how to check for understanding and create interactive lessons, how to implement accountability in student work. In short, what I learned to do was to do a complete audit of EVERYTHING I had been doing for 13 years of teaching, and think about what makes a lesson relevant? How do students learn? What makes them engaged? How can we create authentic and valuable student work? How are we accessing students and are they accurate measures of student understanding? I started providing district-wide teacher professional development on a multitude of topics for virtual teaching.
In 2021, I volunteered to chair the Social Justice PLC (school-specific teacher group) to examine inequities in our curriculum, our dress code, our schedules, our student's lives, and more. I was tasked with developing a new orientation program focused on anti-bias training for new teacher hires for our entire district. For the first time in 30 years, our district-wide dress code was revised to remove any and all gendered language, hoodies and hats and head coverings are no longer banned and sweatpants and pajama pants are now permitted. (There is still a lot of teacher resistance to these changes, but I'll keep pushing for this change).
In 2021, I was named Teacher of the Year.
I started applying and was accepted, to be a presenter at multiple teacher conferences in the state: the NJ Marine Educators Conference, the Science Teachers Conference, the Environmental Educators Alliance Conference, and more.
I started realizing through conversations online and various PD I was attending regarding inequities in education, that the first step is to take an honest look at the curriculum and to determine who is represented and who isn’t. And I realized, as with most American high schools, almost every literature is written by, and written about, white people.
In 2022, I created an informal book club that met during lunch for this school year, and wrote and was awarded a grant to purchase 100 books featuring multicultural experiences; i.e. BIPOC and LGBTQ+ characters and authors, socio-economic struggles, characters with disabilities and mental health issues, immigrant experiences, issues of race and identity, and poverty or food insecurity topics. Students are invited to borrow a book and read it, and come for book club discussions.
I then wrote and was awarded a grant to run a two-week summer STEM camp to target middle schoolers from marginalized, underserved communities, 100% free. They'll get to meet federal scientists, learn about marine science, go on a research vessel, and learn about marine biology and technology. My goal is to make STEM accessible to them and encourage them to apply to my STEM high school (a free public high school, but it is selective admissions, and many of them are simply not aware that our school exists).
In 2022, I also became the National Honor Society club advisor. And we immediately began engaging in multiple community service projects that we had never served before - senior citizen centers, homeless shelters, and a local HIV/AIDS center. Next year we are hoping to expand to the local animal shelter.
I started to realize that while teachers and schools harp on being respectful, we hardly discuss what respect actually means. What does respect look like, sound like, or feel like? How do we act respectfully to one another and why is it important for school culture? As a result of these thoughts, every incoming student at our school now receives a 2-day freshman orientation program, where instead of immediately attending regularly-scheduled classes from Day 1, they attend non-curricular workshops that focus on "academic expectations", "staying organized", and "school culture of respect and inclusion".
In 2023, I wrote another grant (LOL) - this time on climate change education. NJ has become the first state in America to implement comprehensive Grades K - 12 standards in every subject discipline focused on climate change education. I received grant funding to purchase teaching supplies to do a "classroom on wheels" style education advocacy program where I'll bring my high school students as youth advocates to teach climate change lessons to elementary and middle school students in underserved BIPOC communities.
In addition to this, we have started offering free "field trip" opportunities for undeserved communities. Local elementary and middle schools can make arrangements to do a day-trip to our campus (located within a national park), and our high school students engage in delivering marine science activities at the beach, in the classroom, or on our research vessel; to introduce these elementary and middle school students to marine science. All these social justice initiatives have really pulled me out of the science classroom (and sadly I'm finding that nowadays, I'm only in my class 2 - 3 times in any given week) but because my class post-COVID has remained a flipped classroom (more on that in a different post), the students are able to work very independently in my absence.
I feel like in my 17th year, I am truly more than just a science classroom teacher. I am empowering students as agents of change, I'm creating youth advocates for climate change action, I'm creating student leaders who inspire others to pursue marine science. I am so proud of how far I've grown as a professional.