Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Still Fighting...

Although now it's from a new city where I have a new last name and no longer spend my days with children. So much changes in a year.

I now live in Kansas City (home to a Momma and niece that are pretty much the best people in the entire world and completely worth moving across the country for...) I'm a wifey now...anybody that can put up with me through my first 2 years of teaching deserves the best of me for at least the rest of his life...

I work to support 1st and 2nd year teachers across 5 schools. I can occasionally work from home and am rarely up before 8 am (although you will often find me meeting with teachers at Starbucks well into the night...) Most days this role is the best professional development I've ever had, but every once in a while it feels like riding at the front of the first year teacher roller coaster with 21 people in the cars behind you, looking for any sign of panic and 'I don't have this all together'ness.

In my new job I talk about my kids often - the same kids who I shared with you for 2 years - who I now Facebook stalk to make sure they're going to school on time, doing their homework, and not drinking (or at least not posting about it on Facebook...). They're in their mid teens now, and the pictures of them I have hanging in my cubicle look so very different from the chiseled young men they have become over the last 4 years. The stories I tell of them now are very different from the ones shared with you in the moment. They are now more edited - the Disney version instead of the documentary one. Sugar coated. With a music montage in the middle.

The reality is that many of them are not where I hoped they would be. Some have been in and out of juvenile detention. Some have babies. Some do not regularly go to school. And I can't help but wonder what I could have done differently...knowing all the while that I did the best I could with who I was at the time.

I hope to post here more often, if not for support (does anybody even still read this?!), then at least to have a record of the career of a young ed-reformer - incredibly passionate about this gross injustice within our country. Not sure how to fix it - not even sure if I will see it fixed in my lifetime, but dedicated to trying incredibly hard for the rest of my career to make sure that the stories of future Adonys, Maliks, Yahkemps, and Joshuas have happy endings...