I went to college to study literature and education.
I drank in the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Hemingway, Eliot, Whitman, Dickens, Dickinson, and Woolf. I read The Yellow Wallpaper through a feminist lens. I read Samuel Beckett plays until I thought they made sense. I read about schools where children want to learn with parents who make sure that homework is completed and recommend age appropriate novels to read. Schools with funding and no pressure from NCLB, FCAT, MCAS, NYSTP or any acronym you can imagine. I was "prepared" to become a teacher in the real world because I had passion for my subject and all the knowledge of the great teachers who came before me (and published books).
When I walked into my classroom I was a pencil-in-my-bun short of being the quintessential English teacher. I prepared to impart my students with all of the knowledge they could ever want to know about literature. They were not only going to enjoy reading poetry they were going to love to write poetry. We were going to tackle nonfiction, fiction, and drama without batting an eyelash. Writing? Not a problem. Even the boys were going to want to write. My students were going to the smartest students in the city, no, the state because I was the teacher standing in front of them and I had just graduated from college so I knew everything.
I knew nothing.
Not only were my students not the ones from all of the books I had read but also, I was not working in one of those areas where money grows on trees. (They are out there, right?) I found myself in front of 30 teenagers who cared more about who was wearing the latest pair of Jordans than they did about the motivation of the narrator in “The Tell-tale Heart”. Reality was difficult to grasp, how is one person supposed to teach a group of young people the nuances of literature if they barely know how to tell time on an analog clock.
So I did what all great teachers do: I taught what needed to be taught.
I started doing what I call “life lessons” during classes when I think something completely obvious isn’t so obvious to my students. My students keep telling me that I need to write a book about all of the “life lessons” that I teach them but alas I am doing the next best thing: writing a blog. Here I will discuss topics and the advice I have shared with my students.
Who knows maybe their dream of seeing a picture of me sitting in my Snuggie® on my couch drinking my tea will appear on the back of a book jacket one day.
I dedicate this blog to my past, present, and future students and to teachers everywhere who put down the planned lesson to give advice on how to live in the real world.
