“i feel very strongly that change is good because it stirs up the system.” – ann richards

highlights from my life since i blogged last:

• finished first year of teaching
• packed/cleaned and moved out of our apartment
• joined tayte in germany

a couple of thoughts about each of those things.

• finished first year of teaching

wow.
i often noticed that some days or even weeks seemed to drag on for about an eternity, but time flew by. that did not feel like a whole school year. and i know i’ve already talked a lot about my school, but it was the best! if i could, i would stay there for the rest of my teaching career. it was a hard population as far as students go, but i really liked {most} of them. (i think i only had 2 or 3 that i actually disliked) i had the best math department i could have asked for and i made some really good friends while i was there. i will really miss that place.
i didn’t think i had really learned that much or that i really had any strong opinions about how to run a classroom or how to treat students/other teachers. but one of my coworkers asked if i would have dinner with her and her daughter. her daughter was about to start her first year as a math teacher, and my coworker thought it would be good to get some pointers from someone who had just gone through that. i was more than happy to oblige, but i was  and worried i wouldn’t have a thing to say because i didn’t feel any different than i had at the beginning of the year.
boy, was i wrong.
i had so much to say! i really had learned a lot of things and i knew what would and would not work for me in my classroom. i was so grateful for that opportunity to open up and share all those things because it showed me my own growth! here are some examples:

• collaboration is KEY. i feel bad when i hear about teachers that don’t work together. i had a successful first year of teaching (translation: i didn’t give up) because of the teachers i had to work with. not only was i able to get lesson plans from them (which was amazing, by the way), but i was able to go to them for anything and everything. i knew that for 20-30 minutes sometime after school was my vent time. the other new teacher (she was older than me, so she wasn’t as immature, but it was her first year too) would find another of the math teachers that was free and we would just talk about our day. you have to have mental as well as academic collaboration!!
• let your students see you. teachers don’t have perfect lives. teachers have bad days. teachers aren’t always happy. more often than not, teachers speak bluntly and say stuff they don’t mean. but that’s ok. your students won’t treat you like a person unless they see you as one (and even that isn’t a guarantee). one of the best things a student told me was that i treat my students like people, not like students. crap happens in everyone’s life, and sometimes, my math class is not their top priority (it really never is). i get it. my favorite moments in that first year weren’t when i was teaching a hard concept and everyone understood or when i had a perfect lesson (neither of those things ever happened. i wish i was joking). it was when i pulled off my professional, teacher face, sat down on top of a desk at the front of the room, and talked to my students about life. i told them some of my opinions about the world, which i probably shouldn’t have told them as their teacher, but i wanted to be honest. i obviously couldn’t do that every class period, and usually not even every week. but it’s important to not stop that from happening. (it also happened to be the only time when everyone was truly listening, which was a bonus. everyone, that is, except the kids that were already asleep.)
• even if you only reach one student (literally one. like uno. as in, not two), it’s totally worth it. at the end of this year, i wasn’t as satisfied as i thought i would be. this made me question whether or not teaching was really my calling. (that scared me, because i became a teacher because i couldn’t do anything else) but then one of my students brought in a poster to me before school, and she had written me this note that pretty much took up the entire poster (that is not an exaggeration). she thanked me for all i had done and for being the best teacher she had ever had since kindergarten. she was so sweet and genuine, and in that moment, i realized that i couldn’t allow myself to do anything else. she was one student, but that was all i needed.

i could probably go on and talk about phones and how i hate it when students talk in my class, but i won’t go there.

• packed/cleaned and moved out of our apartment

tayte left for germany at the beginning of may, and i still had 4 weeks of school left. that was an amazing distraction. i didn’t realize it at the time, but as soon as school got out and i had all day every day for 2 more weeks to myself, i knew i would have gone insane. so after school got out, i busied myself with packing. (we had to pack all our stuff and move it to tayte’s parents’ basement, where it would stay until we got back from germany, then move it all to st. louis) and by that i mean that i played and frantically packed everything up in the last 3 days. my cousin got married, which pushed my deadline for packing stuff up a few days (which was good). tayte’s parents and brothers came and helped me move and finish cleaning. (clarification: the boys moved the boxes, the women cleaned) i literally could not have done it without them, and i’m so grateful for their help. i have the best in-laws i could have ever asked for!

• joined tayte in germany

so i officially moved out of my apartment and into campbell hq on a saturday, and i flew out on a monday to join my dearly beloved in the land of the germans.
i’ve taken over tayte’s blogging since i officially have nothing else to do, so i’ll be posting regularly on his blog about our adventures and such: taytecampbell.blogspot.com
feel free to check it out.
*in case the above url doesn’t work (which it should), try this one: taytecampbell.blogspot.de