I'm going to try to start a blog partly to help me process some things in this busy time of my life and also to share my experiences with all my friends and family that live hours and hours away. Hopefully I can remember to make regular posts... If you know me, I don't do a whole lot of facebook updates, etc.
For those of you who I haven't spoken to in a long time, let me give you a quick summary.
Mrs. K and I decided to move to "NashVegas", TN so she can start graduate school in biomedical science while I joined the 2010 corps of Teach For America. If you're unfamiliar with Teach For America, go to their website - http://www.teachforamerica.org/what-we-do/. Basically, I've committed to serve a 2-year commitment teaching in a low-income community. Teach For America's approach is all about investing students in Big Goals, making data-driven decisions, having an endless sense of possibility for every student, and relentlessly pursuing results in order to provide not only an excellent education, but a long-lasting transformative education. The goals are lofty and the challenges are great, but it's all in the name of bridging the Achievement Gap and changing the educational inequity that has been our country's education system for decades. For more info on the Achievement Gap, read this article - http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/achievement-gap/.
I was trained for 5 weeks teaching summer school in Atlanta, and now I'm here right in the middle of it all.
I can't really write about all the crazy details that led up to the beginning of my third week teaching 9th Grade Conceptual Physics (which sounds advanced but it's the lower level 9th grade science course) and Honors Biology. So I'm going to start where I am now and maybe fill in details later.
First thing, I have been so blessed to have a fellowship of brothers and sisters in Christ from the '10 Nashville Corps that have met every Sunday night for the past 5 weeks even in the midst of our hectic first weeks of teaching. It has been such a great time of encouragement, prayer, and refocusing for me every week. Mrs. K and I have found a great church near our house as well called Midtown Fellowship, and we've met some friends there too!
One of the things we talked about at our last prayer meeting was one of the many difficulties of being a first-year teacher. We are all driven to be perfectionists for our students (more affectionately, children) because we are beginning to realize what kind of amazing teachers our kids so desperately need to begin to change their life-paths. However, we JUST started, and by no means are we close at having it all together. We agreed that we can't keep beating ourselves up for not being a great teacher yet. It takes time. And in my case, it was making me a more anxious and stressed teacher that was beginning to hate his job. Our friend TJ coined the phrase, "Finding new ways to measure success", which I think is a great way to sum up a remedy for a first-year teacher's sanity. All I can do is give it my best and honor God. And if I can do that, then that is something I can hang my hat on. I trust that eventually it will all come together. And many TFA corps members have been proven successful in their first year. A second-year now at my high school had the highest pass rate for Algebra I test scores out of all the other math teachers at the school. So with support from people like that and many others inside and outside of TFA, I feel like God is really taking care of me and my students.
Just some quick facts to give you a better picture of my situation:
- "The Wood" is the nickname for my high school
- I have no textbooks yet, and I found a used condom in one of the boy's bathroom toilets today. Don't get me wrong. A lot of great changes are happening in TN at the state, district, and school level. I believe in our new principal, but it's definitely going to take some time to make major improvements.
- For those outside of teaching, classroom management (at least as a 1st year teacher) is almost more important than actually teaching the content. So it's definitely not as easy as getting information across to sponge-like minds.
- My Big Goal for my students is for them to become critically-thinking scientists by the end of the year (outside of acing my course). I feel especially equipped to help my students realize this goal after being a critically-thinking scientist in the lab during college.
- TN is doing an A/B schedule so I have all my kids the whole year, three 90 min classes one day and the other three the next day. So that means I am keeping track of about 150 students all at once.
- School is from 7:05-2:05, but my days are more like 5am-5 or 7pm
- Mrs. K and I joined a bowling league on Tuesday nights. Last week I bowled: 189, 206, 220. Not too shabby if I say so myself.
- For my rowing buddies, I have to be honest and confess to not finding the time to workout and stay in shape lately for our alumni race. Hopefully I can get things a little more under control to start that routine because I need it.
- I love every one of the 50-some '10 Nashville Corps members. They're a wonderful bunch.
- Miss everyone back home
- I love being married to my wonderful wife. Don't know how I could do this without her.
Hopefully next time I can talk about some of the delightful future-scientists at The Wood.
MrK
