In an effort to start this blog, I figured I'd write it on my phone on the bus ride home. Bare with me, autocorrect on an iPhone can make for some weird words some times.
Anyways, I am on the bus ride home from my very first day as Ms Darnell, the biology teacher at Dorsey High School in LA. I share my biology class with 3 other teachers and we will each teach a 45 minute lesson everyday. For the first day, I taught for 90 minutes with Dan, also known as Mr Schmitz by my side. We can talk about how I messed up and called him Dan in front of the kids 50 times some other day.
My past few weeks have been spent in hour upon hour of sessions learning about lesson plans, classroom management, investment and everything and anything else about teaching. The hours have been long and tiring, especially when I'm in a brand new city, not to mention a completely different time zone. Trying to balance the fun like meeting new people and exploring California with the planning, note taking, copying etc has been quite the experience. It has been so busy that I haven't reflected much on why exactly I dropped everything to drive all the way across the country to be a teacher.
Today came my reminder: I stepped in front of the classroom nervous and excited to get started on our first activity. To get to know the students we had them make life maps and share with the class a little bit about themselves. One girl, who was a little extra loud, a little argumentative and did not pay attention to most of what I was saying, volunteered to go first. I was overly anxious to see what she was going to say, and praying that it would be appropriate and respectful. When she stood up there she told the entire class in perfect detail that she was going to graduate high school, go to college and becomean x ray technician so that she could buy a big house to live in with her lawyer husband. This same girl, the future x ray technician is in my class because she failed biology and needs to pass it to graduate high school.
That right there is why I want to teach. I want to teach so this future xray technician stays on course and doesn't need a new road on the map of her life.
I am excited and honored to be at Dorsey High School this summer and I cannot wait to help my first class of students pass biology and continue on their road to the future.
