A teacher's story..........

I think I can totally identify with you as you started teaching. My circumstances were very different from yours but I think the stress level was very similar. 

My first year of teaching was in Ojo Caliente, NM. I was supposed to teach kindergarten but a few days before school started they told me I would be teaching 5^th grade. Needless to say, planning for kindergarten is very different from planning for 5^th grade. And not only that but they moved the 5^th grade teacher (she had been teaching 5^th grade for ages in the same room) to 4^th grade and moved me into her room. She was furious. She kept coming into the room and taking her “stuff” and told me I couldn’t have it. 

I had a class of 43. Four of them were special ed students. There was a special ed program at the school but the parents didn’t want their children in that class because all they did was weave baskets (or something like that). So, I had to make 5 different sets of plans for each day. It was really difficult giving individual attention to each of the four and then wanting to give individual attention to all of the others as well. There were also some discipline problems. I was not good at dealing with discipline problems. But I know that if they are engaged in learning, many of the discipline problems go away.  

I had a Tiger-like student also – Julian – he had been held back several times and was older than the other kids, children. He ran around with high school boys and was always getting in trouble with drinking or drugs or something else. I loved on him and tried very hard to help him feel good about himself and to get him interested in learning. 

One day the police came and took him away and he didn’t return to school, at least that year. I was fresh out of college with all these great ideas for making learning interesting and fun.  But just managing the class was so overwhelming, I could hardly get to the learning part. Some of the teachers were mean to my special ed kids, children, and of course the other children were unkind as well. That just broke my heart. They were such sweet kids. 

I did what I could to encourage them. This part of New Mexico had and probably still has the highest poverty rate in the state. Many of the children were from broken homes and living in poverty. I wanted so badly to make learning fun and interesting. I don’t know if they learned a darn thing that year but hopefully, they at least felt respected and appreciated and loved.  A couple of other factors came into play as well. I was one of two “anglo” teachers in the school grades K-12. All the others were Hispanic. Some were okay with me, many were not. I learned firsthand how it feels to be a minority. 

A very valuable lesson – not too pleasant. Also, I was leaving my baby at home. My mom worked all the time. My brother and I always had babysitters. We just wanted to be with our parents but they were not there a lot of the time. It wasn’t their fault they both had to work. But I promised myself that I would not work until my kids got into school. I wanted to be there for them. Well, my husband wanted to buy a camper. Our families were back east (mine in Ohio, his in Pennsylvania) and he wanted to travel to visit them in a camper. So, he wanted me to work for one year and put all that money into the camper. So I did. It tore me up to leave my son every day. I had some other teaching experiences – not so pleasant as well. 

I did, however,  learn how to sit on a thumbtack without reacting (a very useful skill).