This past school year, the 2011-2012 school year, was a challenge for me.  When the school year ended, I did not know if I could go back into my classroom after the summer was over.  I doubt that most people have any idea what it is like being a teacher in today's world, let alone be a teacher in an impoverished "challenge" school.  I make no excuses for myself or our school.  We have a tough road, no doubt, but we all chose that road one way or another.  My question was, "am I going to continue down this road or find a new one?"  There had been some significant changes in my family life.  My niece was pregnant with her first child, my father is getting older, and I was feeling significant pangs of homesickness as my family all live in Chicagoland. Did I want to continue to live 2/3 of the way across the country?  Did I want to miss out on the birth of my grand-nephew?  Did I want to continue to travel for nearly 12 hours to see my family?  Did I want to go back into that classroom?  These questions were exacerbated by my sisters and nieces telling me to move home, offering up teaching job opportunities and connections in schools, and in the end just telling me to pack up and "come home, we'll figure it out."  All of this was further complicated by my landlord telling me that they had decided to sell the house I was living in and thereby forcing my decision to move "somewhere."
   
    At the end of the school year another change happened as well.  Some structural changes in staffing happened and suddenly an opportunity presented itself for me to teach English 12.  To get back my beloved seniors and better yet, get my awesome junior class back again their last year of high school.  To get the ultimate opportunity to prepare some absolutely amazing students for college.  I could not say no.  And that sealed the deal.  Ended all questions.  Created the road that has led to where I currently sit.  I did not walk away or move home, I decided to once and for all make my home here, for better or for worse, for short or for long.  I put in an offer on a condo, I am still waiting for closing, and set some goals.
  
    If I was going to stay, and I had decided I was going to stay, some things had to change.  Common Core is here, and overall I am excited and enchanted with the new standards, but it means new challenges for my students who already struggle to meet the challenges put before them now.  Was I ready to do this?  Then I asked myself a bigger, scarier question, if I wasn't ready to do this, who would be?  I decided to meet the challenge head on and here are the goals I set for myself:  start my graduate program in Instructional Leadership in January (pesky condo pushed it back several months); begin a professional reading club for myself and colleagues interested in reading about, evaluating and enhancing their own professional rigor; read at least one professional and one literary book each quarter to be used in the classroom; start a blog about my classroom experiences, experiments, successes and failures; write reflective pieces to potentially be turned into a research article to be submitted to a professional journal by the end of the school year; and make my classroom student driven and student centered.
  
    How am I going to do all of this?  I am going to do it all by listening to a song and remembering, each time I listen to it, why I stayed, why I came here in the first place, and why my students will always be "my kids" no matter how long ago they graduated or how much they aggravated me in the process.  That's what being a teacher is.  It is sticking it out when it seems the most hopeless.  It is finding new ways of doing things older than you are.  It is loving all of your students, even when you don't like them very much.  It is going to football, volleyball, basketball games when you are dead tired and still have to drive 40 minutes home.  It is staying after school from 3-5 three days a week to offer your students a safe place to do homework, meet up with clubs and friends, or just have a place to be.  It is spending hundreds of dollars of your own money, and then convincing friends and strangers to spend hundreds of dollars of their own money, on your classroom.  This is what teaching is not.  It is not a job.  It is not even a career.  It is not summers off or 8-2:30 or long winter breaks.  It is not babysitting.  It is not providing the country and parents with a whipping boy.  It is not a scapegoat for what you see wrong in the world.  It is not laziness or selfishness.  It IS a vocation, a calling, selflessness and love. 
 
   If you are a teacher and teaching is not that for you, get out, get out now, you are making the rest of us look bad.

   What about the song?  I will tell that story in the next post.