Three Years Shared

Last night the football team played their home opener against a rival school. Over the last year or so, I've picked up the job of unofficial school photographer and about half of my work occurs on Friday nights. I've found in my photos that the gridiron is a place where all of our truest emotions are on display and this Friday was no different.

I cannot deny that my eyes may have teared up a bit at the sight of my boys walking on the field not as the playful sophomores I met two years ago, but as senior captains who carry the world on their shoulders each Friday night with more grace than most men twice their age. I feel so much pride when I think about these boys and all of my other students, too.

This is the best part of teaching the same students for three years: You fall in love. With every single one of them. I cannot quite verbalize how special it is to be able to work with these same wonderful children every day for three years and to get to watch the young men and women they become. I get to share in such a special time in their lives as they refine their sense of self and set out to explore the world. It fills my work with a meaning I'm not sure I'll ever find again. Over these years, I have given my students a piece of my heart and they have given me pieces of theirs in return.

This, too, is the worst part of teaching the same students for three years: You fall in love. If their victories are my victories, then their heartbreaks are my heartbreaks, too. I play witness to losses of all shapes and sizes and my students' lives have not been short on loss.

It is in those times of loss that the strength of the relationships we have built becomes so clear. Time and time again I have found comfort in my students as they have found comfort in me, even if it is just a hug on the sidelines after a particularly bad defeat. There is such a trust and understanding amongst us that could not have existed after only a year together.

This year, as my students prepare for high school graduation, I find myself also wondering what will come next for me as our district faces consolidation. As we wander together into the still-bleary future, none of us can say what will happen, but I feel blessed to know that with every step I take I will carry these kids in my heart forever.

Bittersweet: The End of Year Two

On Monday I put on the same dress that I wore on my first day of teaching and wore it to watch my first group of students graduate. I've always struggled with graduations. Monday night was as much a celebration as it was a goodbye, a hard goodbye. I think if there is a word for the unique emotion of graduation it must be "bittersweet."

The more I think about it, the more I believe that "bittersweet" might actually be the perfect word for all of this year from day one to day one hundred and eighty. It was a year of incredible loss from the turnover of two thirds of the staff to the loss of a student just months short of his graduation. But it was also a year of incredible joy. My students grew their ACT scores and completed awesome and meaningful projects. I created memories with our ragtag softball team even if we never won a game. I watched the salutatorian address her class eloquently knowing that this girl is going to set the world on fire with her brilliance. I have never been so proud.

I can say with confidence that if I have cried more this year, then I have laughed more, too. I think it comes with the territory. As my relationships with this place and these people have deepened, so too has the emotion that comes with that.

This year was as trying as it was rewarding. Though I was often promised it would be easier than my first year, it wasn't. It was just harder in different ways. In the fall, I started running as a way to do something that was just for me. One day I complained to my younger brother, an avid cyclist, and he shared with me these words that have resonated ever since: "It doesn't get easier; you just get faster." That has become my motto this year. The truth is your second year isn't any easier than your first; you just know what you're doing (sort of). Bad things still happen. Sometimes they are worse than all the things that happened before, but now you have the knowledge to navigate it with a little more grace though never with ease. This work isn't meant to be easy; it's meant to be worth it.

The Hardest Part

You are 21 years old and have just agreed to take a leap of faith and do this thing and teach. You know all too well just how little you know. You are going into this blind even if you are aware of your lack of sight.

At every point in this process, you are going to believe that this must be the hardest part. Passing the Praxis, surviving the first week of school, planning for three preps, balancing teaching and coaching and a life of your own, teaching 150 kids in the poorest corner of the poorest state in the country and finding something to love in each and every one of them. At every point in this process, you will be wrong. None of these tasks is the hardest part.

The hardest part starts the moment you agree to do this and will stay with you years after you leave teaching. It stares you in the mirror every morning when you wake and again at night before you lay your head down to sleep. Nearly two years in, you have not even begun to master it, though, you know it is the only thing that will allow you to survive in this job. Here is the hardest part, the skill no one tells you you must have in order to teach: Forgiveness. You must learn to forgive yourself.

Forgive yourself because you have no idea what to do. You will stumble through lessons on topics you are not quite qualified to teach. You will write a kid up when they don't deserve it and not write them up when they most certainly do. You will realize two days into a unit that you have taught an entire skill wrong. You will write tests that are too hard, too easy, and never quite find the right spot in between. Forgive yourself. You are doing the best that you know how to do.

Forgive yourself because you will make every mistake in the book and then write a few new pages of your own. For most of the first half of the first year, you are going to do more things wrong than you do right. You will regret words as soon as you have said them and more than that you will regret the words you do not say at all. Forgive yourself. You are doing the best that you know how to do.

Forgive yourself because even after you have learned how to do better and be the teacher your students deserve, you will not always be allowed to do it. You will be forced again and again to make decisions that you know are wrong for your students. You are working within a system that is stacked against you and your students. You will give test after test after test and know the whole time that it is wrong. You will postpone learning for the sake of "education" and again you will know that it is wrong. When you can you will fight it, but too often you cannot. Forgive yourself. You are doing the best that you know how to do.

Forgive yourself because your students are slipping through your fingers. You will always be running out of time in the class period, in the marking period, in the year. Your time will run out and you will wonder if they have learned anything at all. Forgive yourself. You are doing the best that you know how to do.

Forgive yourself because even if you are the perfect teacher it will not be enough. You will lose some of your students to all manner of misfortune, to jail, to the streets, to time. Rational expressions and binder grades and performance tasks will not stop a speeding bullet when it comes for one of your students. Forgive yourself. You are doing the best that you know how to do.

Ready, Set, Go

"Are you ready for Monday?" they keep asking me.

"Ready" isn't really the word for it, I think. I don't have a roster. I know the subjects I'm teaching, but not the class periods I'm teaching them. I have three preps including the new-to-me algebra III and, to be honest, I'm not really all that sure what, exactly, algebra III is. My shelving units won't show up until Tuesday so everything in my classroom is shoved under a table and behind my desk. Yet, despite all of that, I feel oddly prepared.

Maybe it's just a false sense of confidence from surviving the storied First Year Teaching that will come crashing down at 7:30 on Monday morning, but I think it might be just a little bit real. I may not have all of the details figured out yet, but I do have way more figured out than I did at this time last year. I have unit plans for two of my classes and I know exactly what my students will be doing on the first day I get to see all of my classes. My long-term calendars have been constructed (except for algebra III) and I'm relatively confident that we'll get to cover all of the required topics despite the outlandish amount of testing.

It's more than just the details, though. In some bigger sense, I feel more prepared which I suppose I'm supposed to feel. I've learned a lot in the past year and most of what I learned will help me be a much better teacher this year than I was last year, but there's one lesson that stands out in particular. In fact, if I sat down and picked the single most important thing I learned during my inaugural classroom year, it would be this one: I love my students so much and at the end of the day that is enough. I want to be clear it is not enough to love your students and not teach them the content, but for me when it came down to it loving them was powerful enough to get me through everything else that happened.

There were so many times last year when I thought I couldn't go on and at each of those junctures I was surprised to learn that, when I remembered why and for whom I'm here, I could. At each of those points, I had to remind myself that whatever I found so bad in that moment had been keeping my students down for years. Yes, administrative changes suck when you're a teacher. They suck more when they define your education as a student. Yes, the amount of state testing is oppressive to teachers. It's more oppressive to students who have known nothing else. As a veteran teacher put it, I can pack up and leave at the end of the day. I can drive home at the end of the school day and drive back to Ohio at the end of the year, if I so choose. My students cannot. Leaving is a luxury and it is one my students so often do not have. Going to school every day is my job; for my students, it is their lives.

My students cannot leave and they deserve so much better than this and I love them enough to want to stay here for as long as I can to make it happen. It's this love that keeps me going on the hard days and even on the easy days. I was pretty overwhelmed yesterday with the amount of things that had to be done for the coming year and it left me feeling pretty zapped of energy. And then in walked my students. Some of the football players came by whom I taught last year and whom I will have the singular pleasure of teaching again this year. They were there to help teachers move classrooms and they were actually excited to see me! One of them walked in my room and said with his trademark grin, "Did you miss me?" Of course, I did. I missed all of them. And suddenly, the energy was back. I really have missed them and as physically and mentally unprepared as I may be for Monday, I am so, so ready to be back.

Hard to Love

Sometimes I have to admit that my students are a little bit hard to love. Sometimes they are obnoxious and whiny and pesky and a million other things that teenagers often are. They regularly make me exhausted, frustrated, fed up. I wonder occasionally why I am putting in so much effort for a group of people who can be so cruel and so ungrateful, but even on those days when they leave me wondering why I even like them, I try to do as Mother Teresa said and love them anyway.

It's the other days, though, that they are hardest to love. My students are hardest to love when they fill my days with joy and laughter, when they fill my heart with pride and warmth. It is on the days when my students are easiest to love that I have the hardest time loving them. On these days, it is sometimes difficult to forget the world that spins madly around them. On these day, I sometimes cannot let go of the fear I feel for my students.

Maybe this is the hard part about loving teenagers, of giving a piece of your heart to these young people who are so rife with a sense of independence, recklessness, invincibility. You hear them whisper about their plans for prom night. You hold your breath in the bleachers on Friday night as you wonder whether your student will get up uninjured from the hit they just took on the football field. You listen as they recount the first time they heard gunshots outside their window. You kneel by your bed and pray for the second time this year that a student will make it out of the hospital alive.

And here is where the oxymoron comes in: The more you love them, the more you fear what could happen to them and yet the more you find yourself fearing what could happen to them, the more you know just how much you love them.

I think perhaps this is on my mind because the end of the year is ever so close and with it looms the reality that soon my students will no longer be mine. I've known all year that there is much in their lives that is out of my control, but at least in that time I could watch out for them if only for one hour of the day. For that hour I could do my best to make sure they were safe and they were learning and they felt loved, but when May 24th passes, that ends. When May 24th passes, all I can hope is that they leave me a little bit smarter, a little bit kinder, a little bit more prepared for what's ahead of them. And more than that I hope that they know they matter to someone and, in the immortal words of Dr. Seuss, that "When you get mixed up or hung up or blue, remember there's someone who's pulling for you."

The Monster in the Room

I wasn't tired when I drove home from work today. I wasn't exhausted, my feet didn't ache, my back didn't hurt, my voice wasn't hoarse. For the first time ever, I wasn't tired after work today and it was the worst I've felt all year.

On all those evenings in the past that I drove home angry, sad, frustrated, or just beat, I felt something else, too. Accomplishment. Meaning. Purpose. Even in the moments that I felt the weakest during the rough fall months and on the days where I felt that I was trying to do the impossible, I drew strength from the knowledge that somehow despite all the obstacles I was doing what I came here to do. I was teaching and making a difference, however small it might be. Yes, the victories were small at first, and usually very far between, but they were victories nonetheless and my students were learning.

Today was different, though. Today I did not teach. Today my students did not learn. Today my students took a test, a test I did not want to give, a test they did not want to take. Tomorrow they will take a test again. My school, like many others, is stuck in the midst of a cycle of testing, being pulled into the sticky web by higher-ups at the district who are in turn being pulled by the magnetic force of state-imposed accountability measures, all a side effect of a culture nationwide that emphasizes testing over teaching. It's a culture that is eating away at students and teachers alike, that tells us that "success" is standardized for students, for schools, for states.

Though our intentions may have been to leave no child behind during this race to the top, the train seems to have hopped the tracks. We have somehow confused learning with education. My students tell me that they come to school to get an education so they can get a diploma and go to college to get a job to be "successful." I want to ask them when they stopped coming to school to learn and discover and grow. Was it second grade? Seventh grade? Tenth grade? I wonder when school started feeling less like an adventure to them and more like a series of arbitrary hoops (read: tests) to jump through on the way to a shiny piece of paper. I wonder when it started feeling that way for me. Who exactly did I let convince me that the measure of my intelligence, of my value, was the number at the top of OGT, SAT, ACT, [insert acronym here] score report? Am I becoming that person to my students?

When I have nothing to do but walk up and down the rows of desks and look at their tired faces as they struggle through the fourth two-hour district test in a day, it's hard not to think about this bigger picture, about the state of education learning not just in my classroom, but in the country at large. While day to day I my mind may be occupied with the minutiae of sharpening pencils and grading exit tickets and calling parents, on days like today the big picture crystallizes a little bit and a harsh truth comes into focus. As I fuss at students about not talking during the test, about putting in their best effort, even about always guessing C when they don't know the answer, I am forced to confront a frightening reality and ask myself a hard question: In my fight to create a more equitable system for my students, have I somehow become just another cog within the very machine I sought to destroy?

Teach Them Math

My roommate and I have a saying we call "going down the rabbit hole." For the most part, it refers to obsessive Googling of an often random subject that occasionally leads to momentarily increased anxiety over something inane and usually entirely out of our control. For me, on Saturday night, it was chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That's right. On a Saturday night in my prime years, I was sitting at the kitchen table reading as much as I could about brain damage caused by repeated blows to the head, usually found in professional football players.

That morning I had gone to see the new Will Smith movie "Concussion" about the doctor who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy and the NFL's reaction to the news. But, to be honest, the subject had been weighing on my mind since long before the movies. You see, I teach high school and some of my students play football and some of those athletes get injured and some of those injuries are head injuries. The first time you go to your school's Friday night game and your students get excited to see you there, it's fun and exciting; the first time you see one of your students get knocked down and not get back up right away, it's not.

So on Saturday night the thoughts of "Concussion" and of my football players sent me down the rabbit hole. In the midst of my reading on Mike Webster and Bennet Omalu and Roger Goodell, I would sometimes stop to pop out from behind my computer screen and tell my roommate some horrifying story about an NFL player who had tragically died after a career full of hard hits to the head or to worry aloud about my students. Finally, I said "This stuff scares me and I don't even know what to do about it. I know it's only high school football, but I'm worried about my babies. What am I supposed to do?"

"Teach them math," my roommate replied. And that't just it, isn't it? It's one of the hardest and most important lessons for teachers to learn, especially teachers in high poverty areas like the one I teach in. My students are facing a lot and it's hard not to worry about them, but at the end of the day all I can really do is my job. Everything else is out of my control, but for the 58 minutes they're in my classroom every day there are three things I can do to help them: Love them, support them, and teach them math. If I do that, I've done my job and if I want to keep doing my job and doing it well for years to come I have to be able to do that and then come home and let go at the end of the day.

There are some things in life and in teaching that you can't control and as easy as it is to say that and believe that, it's another thing to live it. It's a skill I'm still learning and one I'll probably be learning for a long time, but it's a skill that I have to grasp. There really isn't much I can do to keep my students safe and happy and secure on the football field or at home or on the bus or wherever else they may go outside of school hours, but, this semester, when I worry about those hours that they aren't with me and what I can do about it, I'm going to commit more often to do just what I'm supposed to do and teach them math.

October is Over (Thank God)

There is something in teaching called "Darktober." It runs roughly through the month of October and, perhaps, a little bit into November. It's characterized by exhaustion, few or no days off, the end of the first grading period, and occasional fits of crying in your car for no apparent reason.

Late fall is a time of year that is notoriously rough for all teachers, but it's particularly hard on new teachers, or at least it was on me. Days were getting shorter, my kids were getting restless, and the end of the grading period with all it's paperwork was getting closer. In the midst of all of this chaos, I tried to push my emotions to the side and just deal with the day to day. Yes, I was tired. Yes, I was frustrated. Yes, I was losing hope. But dealing with all of that could wait because fall break was coming, grades were due, and for the first time I started to feel like I was running out of time with my students. The time for teaching was now; the time for feeling things about teaching was later.

Then it rained. It rained and it rained and it rained from Sunday afternoon all the way through Monday morning. I was coming off a good week that Monday. Fall break had given me a chance to breathe and see my parents and my kids had done particularly well on their quiz the previous Friday. I was all set for another good week despite the torrential downpour, but there's nothing quite like rain to remind you of the reality of your situation and the reality of my situation is simple: I teach in one of the poorest counties in the poorest state in the country. If I had lost sight of that reality, that morning it was hard to miss as I walked through the pouring rain on our flooded outdoor campus among the old buildings with leaky roofs to the copy room where I was greeted by the notable and mysterious absence of one of the copiers (the good one, in fact). There I was, standing in the copy room, slightly drenched and trying to figure out how to teach without any copies when it finally happened: I ran out of patience.

I ran out of patience with everything that Monday morning. I was out of patience with my students. ("You turn your homework into the folder. Where you've turned it in every single day since the beginning of the year. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.") I was out of patience with myself. (Shouldn't I get it by now? Shouldn't I know what I'm doing by now? I can't keep messing up like this, for my students' sake and for mine.) But most of all I was out of patience with the system.

I was and am out of patience with this miserably failing system. I am out of patience with a system that robbed me of 11 out of 39 instructional days first quarter for testing (That's 28% of instructional time spent testing, if you were wondering). I am out of patience with a system that punishes students and schools in areas of systemic poverty by robbing them of even more resources when the schools fail to meet arbitrary measures of success. Most of all, I am out of patience with a system that treats teachers and students like the problem and not like the solution.

That day when I ran out of patience I walked to the office and filled out the paperwork to take a personal day later in the week. A day to myself to process and relax and get a little ahead of the game was just what I needed and ever since I've felt much better and more in control. I still feel out of patience, but I'm not out of energy or passion or desire to be here. When I'm running low on those things, my students help me find them back. I really, really mean it when I say that I love them, and that love kept me at it all the way through October and into the more hopeful weeks of November.

Now, as things start to look up again, it's a little bit easier to sit down and look at October from a critical distance which is why I'm writing about it now instead of as it was happening. The first week of November went by quickly and victories in the classroom are starting to seem closer and more significant. A smile from a student who hasn't cracked a smile since September, a strong performance task from a student who struggles with completing problems independently, and a kind remark from a student who I had previously had a strained relationship with. It's these things that help me put October behind me and look forward to better days to come because better days will surely come.

Delta Love: You Are Not An Island

Fall, I think, is a time for gratitude. Thanksgiving looms and quiet, cool weekends lend themselves to time for reflection. The changing seasons make the quick passage of time more obvious and it is impossible not to take some time to ruminate on life.

My first fall in Mississippi has made me thankful for the monarch butterflies that are flying south for winter. I am grateful for the cool breezes and the storms that sweep across the Delta bringing rain and respite from the still persistent heat. I am also thankful for the arrival of fall break this week, signaling the end of the first nine weeks. By some small miracle I've made through a quarter of the year, though not without many bumps in the road.

More than anything this fall, I am thankful for the support I've received, especially the support from other teachers. New teachers receive a lot of advice from everyone: Don't smile until Christmas. Don't cry in front of your students. Have high expectations. Go home early at least one day a week. That's all great, but the piece of advice I think is most important for new teachers is this: Reach out. Make friends. Remember that you are not alone.

The job of a teacher is hard and it can feel isolating.  For large portions of the day you are alone in your room with 20 or more students. At times you will inevitably feel alone in your struggle, but you are not an island and there are people all around you who will help you through this journey.

For me, one of the most meaningful support systems I've had is the other teachers at my school and a rough last week of the grading period has left me feeling especially grateful for them. I can say with 100% confidence that I would not have made it through the year so far without them. Countless times the special education teacher who works with the math department has advised and counseled me so many times and has been endlessly patient as I fumble through my first year and try to get get a grip. More than once he has coached me through a crisis of confidence and I could not be more grateful for his presence in my classroom and his patience and generosity. The department head always has my back and is constantly helping me out, sharing lesson plans and answering my innumerable questions. The teacher next door is always looking out for me, reminding me when I most need it that I'm doing a good job, all things considered. There is a history teacher who regularly takes new teachers under her wing and will stop at nothing to help us out. She's helped me plan lessons at the last minute and rearrange my classroom to make it more conducive to learning, but more than that she's just been kind. So often it is talking and laughing with her at the end of a particularly hard day that makes me feel human again.

It doesn't stop with the veteran teachers, though. I am just as grateful for the new and relatively new teachers as I am for those who have been in the trenches for a little while longer. After all, it's these teachers who best know what you're going through since they're right there with you. I am so grateful for the new teachers at my school who I've been on this crazy ride with. It's these teachers who I've compared notes with and commiserated with. We celebrate victories together and laugh at the craziness of all of it. It is their classrooms I escape to in the morning when I need a quiet moment or during my planning period when I need a pep talk. It's also their classrooms I return to at the end of the day to cry or laugh when I need to. I can only hope that I have managed to be there for them in the way they have been there for me.

New teachers have all sorts of voices trying to offer advice and support. There will be mentors and coaches and consultants, but at the end of the day the best support is usually right next door or across the hallway. I often tell my students that in our classroom we are a team and your team is your family. I am grateful this fall to not only have such a special student team, but also a wonderful teacher team. I may be 600 miles away from my real family, but if team means family then my teacher team is the best Mississippi family I could ask for.

On Calculators and the Education Gap

Sometimes it's the little things that let you know just how big the problem is. For me, it's calculators.

This week in my algebra 1 class I've been teaching sequences and exponential functions. In non-math speak, that means we've been talking about calculating things that require multiplying a number by itself over and over and over again. In the real world, exponential functions are all around us. They allow us to calculate interest on financial investments and depreciation on cars as well as growth rates for elephant populations. In many ways, the financial and biological worlds operate in exponentials. They're a foundational skill of algebra and essential to how the world around us works. They're also pretty damn tedious to calculate on paper or with a four function calculator.

Unfortunately, paper and four function calculators are what my class has. Room 10 is currently in possession of exactly five calculators purchased from Walmart for 50 cents each, which I can borrow from the office on days when other teachers haven't gotten there first. These calculators add, subtract, multiply, and divide and when the battery runs out we just throw them away; a new battery costs more than a new calculator. Four functions can get you pretty far, but these calculators fall a bit short when you're asking students to calculate 1.1^8. When you have to type 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 = into a calculator, it takes a lot of time and leaves a lot of room for human error. So for the most part, my co-teacher and I are limited to giving our students pretty simple problems. On days we don't have calculators, it often means not using decimals in examples or practice problems. Even on the days we do have calculators, it might mean calculating the value of a bank account in the 5th year of receiving interest instead of the 16th year.

In contrast to my students and their 50 cent calculators, I got my first scientific calculator in the 9th grade. It had an exponent function and all of the trig functions and could convert between degrees and radians. It cost about $30 and it was an expectation that all students have their own calculator for school. By 10th grade, we were required to upgrade to an $80 graphing calculator. And, honestly, I never thought anything of it. Every day I learned how to do  new things on my calculator and took it home at night to use for my homework. By the time my ACT, SAT, and AP tests rolled around, I was a master of my TI-83 and could fly through problems requiring complex arithmetic calculations.

Students in the Delta don't have that luxury. It would be ludicrous to expect parents in some of the poorest counties in the nation to provide a $30 calculator one year and an $80 one the next. Instead, most schools have a class set. It might not include enough calculators for every student to use one during class and some might be broken and almost certainly students will not be able to take these calculators home to use for homework at night. Some schools let students borrow these calculators for college admissions tests and some do not. On a day to day basis, not having a calculator might not seem like that big of a deal, but when you are taking your ACT on a Saturday morning with a calculator you've barely ever practiced with next to a kid from the private school down the road who is keying in numbers to his familiar, personal calculator, suddenly that calculator becomes a much bigger deal.

Maybe in the state with the lowest educational attainment in the country, the highest infant mortality rate, and the lowest educational attainment, calculators aren't really the problem. Maybe standing in poorest state in the Union and worrying about calculators is just me missing the forest for the trees. But perhaps not.

You see, for me, calculators, more than any one thing, have come to represent the gaping space between the educational opportunities I received and the educational opportunities my students will receive. They represent the little everyday challenges that distract you from the bigger ones, the molehills that make you forget the mountain. If poverty means not worrying about who to vote for because you're too worried about where dinner is coming from, then educational inequity means not worrying about how you'll pay for college because you're too worried about taking the ACT without a calculator.

I wish I could tell you that I've found a clever workaround for this problem in my classroom, but I haven't. I just write examples that don't look like the ones that show up on tests and count on my students, who can multiply 81 by 3 in their heads way faster than I can. At the end of the day, my students are the people who will face the biggest challenges from both a lack of calculators and a lack of educational opportunities, but I'm convinced that those students will also be exactly the people who figure out how to fix those problems for the students that come after them. I can't wait to see them do it.

How Did I End Up Here?

More than one year ago, as a junior at Ohio State, I began my application for Teach for America's 2015 teacher corps. As a political science major, teaching wasn't necessarily what I had always imagined doing. With a forecasted graduation in spring 2015, I had previously imagined that I would launch my career as a low-level staffer on a presidential campaign for the 2016 election. There were a lot of exciting names being tossed around as potential candidates for the 2016 cycle and, more exciting for me, it seemed like this might be the best chance America had seen to elect a woman. Yet somehow even with my excitement at the prospect of being part of a ground-breaking campaign, I lacked a degree of certainty. There was still something pulling me away from this path.

That was when I received an email from a campus recruiter for TFA. The early admission deadline was fast approaching. TFA had always been in my periphery as a post-graduate option. I knew that one day I wanted to go into policy work or politics, and I knew that education was the most important issue to me. What ultimately influenced my decision to apply, however, was the time I had spent during high school observing my mother's journey as a special education teacher. Through her eyes it became clear to me that legislators making laws about teaching without setting foot in front of a blackboard would always be a part of the problem more than they would be part of the solution. I knew then that I didn't want to be one of those legislators and the best way to avoid that outcome was to teach, to figure out for myself how government and society can better support teachers AND students instead of a viewing them as opposing forces. So I took a leap of faith and applied to teach.

The application process was a long one, but the advantage for me was that the time and energy demanded of me during this process helped me to realize how much I wanted to this. As a friend put it, he hadn't been sold on me as a teacher until he saw how much passion I was approaching this application with. That passion convinced me, too. By the time May rolled around and I was notified of my admission, I knew that applying had been the right choice.

Then, a bombshell was dropped. I had ranked TFA's regional placements as soon as I was informed of my admission, but it wasn't until a week or two later that I received my official regional placement, something that was more or less immutable. I had agreed to go almost anywhere that I was needed when I ranked my regions, with one or two exceptions based on budget, but in my ranking I had placed a priority on the kind of environment and distance to family with regions in California, Texas, and the Midwest ranking near the top of my list. I was eagerly awaiting a placement decision and crossing my fingers for my first choice of Sacramento when I logged onto to the TFA admission portal to find the biggest shock of my life waiting for me: Mississippi.

That's right. Mississippi. Tree hugging, city girl heads to the heart of the Deep South. It sounded like a cheesy coming of age story, or worse, a horror movie. For a brief period, I let fear get the best of me and thought about pursuing another option. After all, Mississippi wasn't even close to any family and it just wasn't what I had pictured, but I did some research and it turned out Mississippi had a lot to offer (I'll get to that in a future post). Ultimately, what assuaged my doubts was something a TFA recruiter had said at some point during the process that has stuck with me ever since: "Remember, it's not Teach for San Francisco or Teach for Chicago or Teach for Delaware; it's Teach for America." I knew she was right so if Mississippi needed me then it was to Mississippi I would go.

But Mississippi wasn't the last curveball to come my way. The next would arrive in November just before I was asked to make an official commitment to teach for two years. It was time for my subject placement. Going into the process, I was anticipating a placement in the humanities. Surely, a person with political science would be teaching social studies or English, maybe even Spanish so naturally I was a little surprised when I once again logged onto the TFA admission portal to see the words "high school mathematics" waiting for me. How did that happen? Well, the best I can guess is this: I'm a political science major, but on the road to that major I've also majored in, at one point or another, biology, journalism, computer science and engineering, and physics. What I really wanted to do in college was learn a little bit about everything, but, as it turns out, "Bachelor of Science in Everything" is not a degree you can get at Ohio State so I ended up with my first love: politics. However, on the long and meandering path to a degree in political science I had completed a good amount of math classes and by "good" I mean a handful more than the average social sciences major. That meant I was more qualified to teach math than a lot of TFA's applicants and the need for math teachers, I'm sure you've heard, is astronomically high. For an hour or two, my commitment to this idea of teaching again began to waver, but I woke up the next morning and just knew that this was still right. I was still meant to be teaching even if it was the last subject I expected in the last place I expected. 

Over the next few months I would make my commitment official and begin the challenging work of dusting off my mathematical knowledge in order to pass the Praxis, the required certification exam for teachers in Mississippi. I took the test in January and am happy to report that, by some sort of miracle, I passed. Now, in addition to preparing to teach math, I'm also preparing for the move to such a foreign place. That transition is part of what I hope to document here and I hope you'll enjoy the journey with me.