Teacher Hungover on the First Day of School

Note: This is the first blog post I wrote for the EdTech startup company I worked for when I left teaching. I wanted to document it here because I think it still rings true for teaching, but also for any career or job change. Enjoy

Every year I show up hungover on the first day of school. An intoxication not produced by the consumption of liquor, spirits, or tainted fruit.  It’s produced from the lingering memories of the previous year.  As new students walk into my class for the first time I would get nostalgic about the students I had the previous year. When I meet my new students I slowly start to remember that we are starting from square one. They don’t know classroom routines and they definitely don’t know the new curriculum which we will be working tirelessly on all year long.  

This is what I call the hangover effect. I’ve been teaching for six years and it always hits me during the first week of school, but it always comes as a surprise for some reason.  When it does hit, I go through a series of stages similar in nature to the five stages of grief, but I only have three.   First I become angry, then I become depressed, and eventually, I accept the fact that I have to work just as hard this year as I did last year. The great, but difficult thing about teaching is that you start fresh every school year. 

To help me with this teacher hangover I’ve incorporated a principle that I learned from a teacher and mentor that lives in Los Angeles. He told me he adds one new thing to his class every year in order to push and motivate himself so that he doesn’t get stagnate. I’ve taken that advice to heart and have implemented something new every year in my own classroom.  Some are successful and some are not so successful, but the point is that it fires me up for the new school year. It keeps my mind busy during the summer and helps me get over my hangover quicker because the class and I are doing something that the previous class didn’t do. We’re learning something new together.  

(shameless plug for the company I worked for)

If you’d like to add something to your class this year I’d suggest finding a tech tool that you’d like to learn and integrate with your students. Great technology tools can be found in the ever-growing video library that Kyte Learning has available. My new favorite tool is EdPuzzle. Find a tool that works for you at KyteLearning.com. 

The Substitute!

There was a movie that came out in 1996 called "The Substitute." I haven't seen the whole movie, but I've seen clips on YouTube. I always criticize movies about education because they often exaggerate or leave out certain aspects of the profession. This one used to fit into that category, until last year.

My mentor, Rafe Esquith, would often say movie producers wanted to make a movie about him and his role as an educator teaching at an inner-city school in Los Angeles. He always turned them down because he never wanted to give the wrong impression about teaching. 

Odds are students won't be standing on a desk reciting poetry as you are being led out of the classroom for disobeying the headmaster of a private school. 

Odds are you aren't going to save an entire group of inner-city youths by having them write in a journal. 

Odds are you aren't going to walk into a school in Harlem as a teacher is quitting and then immediately take over the class where you learn more from the students than they learn from you. 

However, the movie after which I've titled this post after, was more correct than I wanted it to be. 

This last year, our state had a shortage of substitute teachers. It was so bad that the governor asked for state employees to take leave in order to substitute teach. In fact, the state would give us additional time off so we didn't have to use our personal leave. I don't know how many people took him up on this offer, but I do know the governor made time to substitute teach at a middle school long enough to get a few photos for the newspaper. (see below)

I thought this idea was awesome and I had even been talking about it with my colleagues at the state board of education. I know this sounds crazy, but I thought it was important for those of us working in education and making rules for educators, to dip our toe into the classroom occasionally in order to get a feel of what teaching is like in our schools. I stopped teaching in 2016 and I know our schools and students have changed drastically since then. 

I was lucky to find several opportunities to work in a number of school settings as a substitute. I worked at some jr. highs, high schools, and even an elementary school. I thought it would be just like riding a bike and I was somewhat correct. That is if the bike had two flat tires and no handlebars. 

It was a miserable experience. I know having your own classroom is a very different thing than being a substitute teacher, but I used to substitute teach back in 2009 and I felt like it was much easier back then. Almost every school had the same problem and it made me realize why we were having a substitute teacher shortage in the first place. 

The last substitute job I took was at an elementary school teaching 4th grade. This is the grade I used to teach and I was looking forward to it because I was a good 4th grade teacher. Sure, I had problem kids in my teaching days, but the classroom as a whole was good. Students got along and we had a good class culture. I thought I would be able to bring that same energy to this new classroom. I knew that might have been a bigger task than I expected as the principal continued to drop in throughout the morning. It was still early, but the principal had already come in twice to check in on me and the class. I soon realized why. 

After an hour or so, the first problem happened. Two students were starting to argue about something and then they started telling each other to eff off. This didn't sit well with me, so I sent them to the office. As I was watching them walk down the hall, some noise was coming from inside the classroom. It turns out one of the students, who was larger than most kids his age and bound to a wheelchair, was being teased by other students. I soon found that this was very common and he would often fight back and only make the teasing worse. 

As I went back inside to handle this fire, the school's counselor and learning coach came down to ask what the other two students had done. I told them that they were telling each other to eff off and the learning coach sighed and said, "When they use language like that we just remind them to use professional language." I could tell she knew that this was something that never worked in their school, but that is how they were taught to handle these types of situations. 

The only ray of light about this day was that they were being released early, so I only had to be there until 12:30. If it had been a full day, I would've left at lunch because it was that bad. There are many awful events that took place that day, but nothing worse than the email I got from the agency that was in charge of placing substitutes. 

I was told that MY behavior was unprofessional that day because a student had told a parent or teacher that I had said the class was awful (which they absolutely were). I was reprimanded for saying this. However, the context of me saying that to the class was it was AWFUL how they were treating that poor student in the wheelchair and they should stop bullying him. I wrote the company back and told them they didn't have to worry about me because I was never going to substitute teach for that school or district ever again. 

I left that school with a lot of feelings, none of them good. It made me really angry because this was a profession I loved, but it only took one day...ONE DAY!!! to make me so disheartened and bitter about it that I decided I'd probably never teach in the classroom again. I could talk about some of the other experiences I had during my short stint as a substitute teacher, but this is the one that stuck with me and impacted me the most. 

If you've ever substitute taught, my hat is off to you. If you're a teacher, please make that day as easy as possible for the substitute. Simple things like a seating chart or a class leader to help the substitute can make their day 100% better. 

Pro Tip: FERPA allows you to leave notes about specific students if you think it is applicable to their job for the day. Take advantage of this. 

So We Beat On, Boats Against the Current...Into the Past.

Why am I doing this? It's been over seven years since I've last written a blog post. I don't even know if blogs are still a thing anymore, but I've been wanting to get some of my thoughts down. I don't have a personal journal, so what better place to jot my memories than the internet for all to see. I think this first post needs to be a quick update and recap of the last few years. I'll break it down by career changes. 

2016-2017 Kyte Learning

I quit my job teaching at Ellis on August 1, 2016. The superintendent decided to move our principal to another school and I did not have a good feeling about the new one, so I wanted to jump ship. Luckily, a company I had been making videos for was looking to hire someone. They called me, asked if I was looking for a job, and I said yes. I started working for Kyte Learning that year and I loved it. I think a fear that most teachers have about leaving the classroom is that they will get bored sitting in a chair all day and not having the summers off. Well, let me assuage your fears, it was the best job I could've ever had at that time. Kyte is a small start-up that specializes in creating and curating ed tech videos for teachers in order to learn how to use technology in the classroom. I got to make some fun videos and make some great friends along the way. Unfortunately, my anxiety couldn't handle the idea of losing my job at any given moment if we lost our funding, so I decided to look for another job. 

2017-2020 USBE Student Data Privacy 

I interviewed for a student data privacy specialist position at the Utah State Board of Education. Originally, I only wanted to receive an offer so I could negotiate for a higher salary at Kyte Learning, but that anxiety of losing my job kicked in, so I begrudgingly accepted the offer from USBE. I went from playing Spike Ball twice a day at Kyte to sitting in a cubicle with little to no interaction with any of my coworkers at USBE. I thought I had made a huge mistake. Fortunately, my boss was good to me and we eventually hired someone within the agency that would eventually show me how to read law and policy. He also ended up being a really good on-screen personality, which was helpful because my main job was to create a series of training videos to help educators across the state understand student data privacy law. 

We made a lot of videos and I can honestly say that I had a blast making them. We traveled across the state to film in different locations and we received a lot of positive feedback on them. We were a new department and we had a small team, but that's what I loved about it. We were able to think outside of the government-mandated box and we did things differently. After three years, I felt like I had accomplished everything I set out to do with that job so I was becoming very bored. 

I decided in 2019 that I wanted to earn my school leadership license and become an administrator. There aren't many pathways in education that lead to more money, so I made this step thinking it was the most logical thing to do. I'm glad I went through this program because it made me realize that I'm not quite ready to become an administrator. I learned a lot and had some great experiences during my internships, but by the end of the program, I had become burned out and thought this would not be a good direction for me. 

2020-2023 USBE Licensing

I was already bored with my data privacy job, but I became miserable when COVID hit. I felt like I had nothing to do all day and I needed to change things up. Several jobs had opened up at USBE and I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring. After an interview, I was offered a job working in the licensing department where I would work with out-of-state applications and university educator preparation programs. I had never done any type of clerical work, but I thought it would give me a steady supply of work to do so that I wouldn't be bored anymore. Well, I underestimated the workload and soon became filled with stress and anxiety. It didn't help that most of the department was new and that COVID had fundamentally changed our work environment. On top of all of this, I was seriously dating someone and planning a proposal. Also, we were in the process of looking for a house in the middle of the housing boom. 

Needless to say, that first year was very hard, but I learned a lot along the way. I felt pretty comfortable in my role and am able to work with some great people. I've helped transition our department from physical to digital applications and have issued hundreds of licenses to educators across Utah. It's a good feeling to help someone with a license so they can apply for a job and start a new life in the state. 

Present Day

I ended up getting married in May of 2021. We moved into our house in June of 2021. Life is still marching forward and I'm happy where I'm at...for now. I'm not sure how long I'll be in my current position, but I often think back to my days teaching in the classroom. My wife makes fun of the fact that I have several large totes filled with materials from my time in the classroom. I'm not sure if other people who have left education have this feeling, but I'll occasionally long for my teaching days. It's a tough job, which is probably why I haven't decided to go back to the classroom. It is, however, a job that sticks with you and occasionally calls you back because you know you could've done a better job and you feel like you still got something left in the tank to give. I feel like Nick, talking about Gatsby and the green light at the end of the dock in "The Great Gatsby" 

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly, into the past."

The time just flies

NOTE: For the past year and a half the film maker above  (Casey Neistat) has truly inspired me

It's been a while since I posted last.  Over a year and a half actually.  Let me go over some details of what has happened in my teaching career as of late.  Firstly, I'm still teaching 4th grade at Ellis. Last year I had a really great class.  They ended up having the best test scores in the city which was pretty awesome.  My video club won some competitions again, but I really didn't like the kids in the club. I felt like I was babysitting more than I was teaching.  Last year ended up just being a really great year. I started feeling very comfortable with teaching and what I had to do to get students to succeed.

This year things have changed.  The other fourth grade teacher that taught with me left to teach 5th grade. That meant a new teacher came in to replace her. I've never been the veteran teacher and I've had a hard time adjusting to that role. Also, I must be a really horrible person because I've made this new teacher cry several times.  I don't know how to handle people that are so emotionally fragile.

I have an intern this year which has been great. Normally I would've hated having someone in my class all year, but our district has implemented a new reading and writing program.  I'm probably its most outspoken critic, which has left a bitter taste in the eyes of the district and my principal.  I still don't understand how administrators, who don't teach, can argue that materials, that they've never used before, are going to improve our scores.  Anyway, I've given the intern all of the reading and writing stuff (ReadyGen) to teach this year.  It's prevented me from having complete mental breakdowns and quit, so there's that.

We had about 34 kids in my class this year and they are a weird bunch.  Definitely some trouble makers, but they are coming along slowly now.  It makes me really miss last year's class. The following is a list of stuff I've accomplished for memory sake:
- Made several films for the school district
- Won several video contests from ProjectEd.com and NextVista.org
- Won the Voya Unsung Hero grant/award for $2,000 to start a film festival
- Got some money to start a Lego Robotics league (never competed in the league....oops)
- Started making videos for several companies.
- Taught a 4-H club how to edit videos (it did not go as well as I expected)

Anyway, right now I'm walking on the aforementioned moving sidewalk.  Last year I was running on it and life was great. I'm trying to motivate myself to run on it again, but then I get tired and I just rest on it, which sends me further back than where I started last year.  The main reason for my lack of motivation is that our new Superintendent has blacklisted me from ever getting a better job in this district and my principal hates me because I make teachers cry.  It's amazing how different you can feel from one year to the next.  I must be in one of the valleys they saw on the last blog post.  I'm just trying to figure out what mountain I want to try and climb next.

Nothing but Mountains!

The clip above is from the movie "Alive." It's a story about a plane that crashes in the Andes Mountains with a group of soccer players.  The story is well known because a lot of them had to resort to cannibalism to survive.  That was the one thing people always talked about with this movie, but I've always remembered this scene.  I probably saw this movie in 6th grade, far too young for an R rated film.  I think of this clip most often when I'm hiking or camping and I get to see the rolling hills of the Rockies.  When I saw this scene I thought how awful they must've felt to have finally made it to the mountain top to see where they might find a place to get help, but then only discovered more mountains. 

It's been a while since I last wrote, but a lot has happened over the last year or so of teaching.  I often compare my last year of teaching to this scene in the movie.  Last year I was able to accomplish a lot and I recognize that a lot of it wasn't necessarily deserved. I did it though, I made it to the mountain top...kind of.  Let me run down a list of some of the accomplishments from last year: won teacher of the year for my elementary school, was featured in the local newspaper several times, was featured on ABC 4 News and Fox 13 for my work in establishing a theater/video club for my school, won some international awards for some of the videos we made (Scotties Trees Rock Finalist, White House Film Festival Finalist, and Grand Prize Winner of several other competitions), and was able to get some major funds for the club through grants.

When I started teaching I set off to be the best teacher in the world.  Heck, I've even declared such a thing at the top of this blog.  Last year seemed to be a good push in that direction.  I actually hadn't planned on getting this much attention this far into my career.  I thought it would take me several more years to be recognized for anything I've done in the classroom.  When all is said and done after this last year, all I see is more mountains.  I've made it to the top of one peak and I could've quit and found another job thinking I had accomplished everything I set out to do, but there is still a lot more I need to accomplish before I feel satisfied with ending my career as a teacher.  To be completely honest the stuff I've been recognized for has been great, but I've also felt a bit empty.

I've been a bit selfish and some of this stuff I've wanted to do for myself, to make me look good.  I've climbed many peaks in my life, but most of my students have never felt that type of success before.  A teacher's journey to the top of the mountain is a wasted journey if they leave their students behind.  That's why I've made it a point to put the children in the spotlight from now on. The kids enjoyed watching and making the movies we created, but the happiest I ever saw them was when they were creating stuff they had done all by themselves.  This year I'm trying to change the way I do things by putting students in control.  After all, did I get into teaching to help others succeed, or myself?

The great thing about being a teacher is the fact that there are so many mountain peaks you can climb.  You'll never get bored with this job because each year brings with it a new set of students which means a new set of learning behaviors and styles.  I get to climb a new mountain every year with my students and I get to show them the other mountain peaks at the top.  It's up to them to decide which peak they want to travel to next.  This journey is long and slow, but the reward comes in looking back and seeing where both yourself and your students have come from.  I usually don't see that until the start of the next year when I have to teach and train my students on the most simple of things that I take for granted with my students from the previous year. The new year has just begun and I'm excited for what challenges this year's mountain brings me because I know at the end of my journey I won't be at the top alone. 

Those that can, Teach.

I laughed really hard at this clip in the movie "School of Rock" the first time I heard it. Now there is a new saying that is pretty similar that made me chuckle a bit.  Not because it wasn't funny, but because it is sadly true.  Those that can, teach. Those that can't, make the rules for teachers.

There has been a lot of uproar over the new Common Core Standards that most of the states have decided to use as their curriculum guide.  I went to a meeting last year where a person from the Utah State Board of Education came to talk to teachers about a new style of test that we will start using for our end of level tests.  They showed us a lot of great features that it has and they tried to sell us on the idea that this way of testing will help us get a better sense of what the student understands more so than a multiple choice standardized test.

After the presentation there were a lot of parents in the crowd that started to ask questions about the Common Core and the role of certain people in the testing application we were implementing.  They were concerned that it was a government conspiracy to pry into their child's lives and keep tabs on them.  I know some kids have to tape the cameras on their computers because they think other people are going to hack into their computer and spy on them.  I left the meeting after the 3rd comment because I realized the direction the conversation was going.  I heard later that i was correct and that I should've stayed because it was quite entertaining.

The truth of the matter is that these people are looking for conspiracies that don't exist (hopefully) and aren't looking at the real problem here.  The people that are creating the standards and the people telling teachers how to teach, what to teach, and when to teach it have very little experience in the education field.  When I say education field, I mean teaching.  This does not include Teach for America nor does it include summer camps or after school clubs.  I've seen how these operate and they are simply a daycare service/day camp for kids who don't have a place to go after school.  I love these programs, but teaching in a regular classroom is completely different than the sort of job I just described.

I've recently learned about a man named David Coleman who was the mastermind behind the Common Core.  He's a very educated man with degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale. Did I mention he is a Rhodes Scholar? Well I've seen a couple of his interviews and I'm not impressed with the man.  He seems like an elitist that comes across as a man who is always right.  I get the impression that he feels teachers are not doing a good job and that if we taught like him then the world would be a utopian society where everyone attended an Ivy League school.

Attached is a blurb about his thoughts on what students commonly write about.  In essence he says that the type of thing I'm doing right now, expressing my opinion, is of little worth.  I would not expect this from someone who speaks to large groups about his personal opinions on education. I disagree with this man on so many levels that I find the pill I'm forced to swallow next year as we implement the Language Arts portion of the Common Core.  Why is it that a man with no teaching experience is telling us what makes good teachers? For your viewing pleasure, two videos of the man himself. Click HERE to view video.

Really...I mean, REALLY?

I really feel for the spelling bee announcer in this video.  I mean really, she isn't that hard to understand.  She speaks perfectly clear a few dozen times.  Seriously, what is the deal kid?  Clean the gunk out of your ears and listen.  At first I thought he was kidding.  Maybe it was an Onion video that made fun of situations like this, but nope, it was real.  You can see the relief in his eyes when he finally realizes what word it was that he was to spell.  He spells it easily and then sits back down.  That feeling and look he has at the end is what teachers commonly refer to as an "ah-ha" moment.  That moment where after a certain amount of time a child finally "gets it."  You hear about this moment when you go through school and you are told that it is the greatest feeling you can have as a teacher.  That feeling you have that after so many hours of planning and working (sometimes with just this student in mind or at hand) you get when everything comes together in the child's mind and then they understand everything.  That is the coveted and prized award that teachers get for working harder than they are paid for.  "That's why we do it" I've heard, "That's when everything you sacrificed becomes worth it."

What happens when they don't get it though?  What if you work harder than you ever had, sacrificing your time to make an impact on students, and then nothing happens?  What is the opposite feeling of relief and success?  Let me tell you, because I've been feeling it for the last month. A few feelings come to mind, but these are the ones that I feel the deepest: depression, sadness, and failure.  They don't tell you about that in school.  Let me tell you why I've been feeling this lately. 

For the last month and a half I've been spending an hour after school tutoring my really low kids in math.  Once a week I have my class take a skills test on math concepts we've already learned this year and then I take the lowest scoring students and then break them into 2 groups that I meet with after school for a half hour each.  I originally thought I was going to cure their math woes because I had more time to help them.  I spent the first week with them and felt that they understood everything.  I gave them the same test and then I compared the scores.  To my surprise, to my utter astonishment, most of them did a point or two better, a couple really aced it, and then a couple did worse.  WORSE! How does this happen?  They were fine when we talked about each skill individually, but put it all onto one test and they act like they've never seen it before.  I mean...REALLY!?

Well, I'm sure the month of March has something to do with these feelings I've been having.  March is the longest month of the school year because we get no breaks and the month right before we really gear up for end of level tests.  Really, it's the last month that we can teach everything that needs to be taught before we start testing and preparing for the tests.  When I try to help my students and I see that anything I try to do so they can get help and get better isn't working, I tend to feel bad.  I feel incompetent as a teacher.  Even more so, I feel bad for the students that continually lag behind in every subject even after teachers have put in extra time with them.  When will they get it? Will they ever get it? How will this effect their life? Well, I'm not going to worry about that right now because SPRING BREAK HAS ARRIVED!  I really need this because as the song says, "You'll lose the blues in CHICAGO."