SHARING THE SPACE WITH COLLEAGUES
“I have colleagues that are just as excited about teaching. When they are excited, they walk into the room and go, ‘I have this idea for a lesson. It's gonna be phenomenal!’ and encourage me, ‘Hey, you should come. See what I'm going to do, because I think you would love this’ (…) I had a mentor last year who's phenomenal. He's been teaching for thirty plus years (…) and the lessons he did were incredible. (….) We just have back-and-forth discussions on the pedagogy (…) with ten other teachers in the room with us, and they would constantly be like, ‘We have to stop working because we have to listen to you both rambling and going on about what you did in the classroom, and that's infectious.”
“I used to want my own classroom (…), my own space. ‘This is my room. I get to design it. I can manipulate it and do whatever I want.’ I never really had that, though. I've always had to share classrooms with other people. So I'm in an office space and an office space can be the greatest thing and the worst thing. You can bring in some of the greatest joys, cause I'm like, ‘Oh, my God! I love talking to people. They're so much fun, they have good ideas for how to be a better teacher (…) Now, I found (…) the worst negative thoughts come in there sometimes because when you get conflicts between colleagues or somebody brings a political discussion in (...) And now you just see the energy in a room be destroyed. So there is a dual side to this shared space, but that shared space is so nice, because I think if I was in my own classroom, sometimes I'd be more hesitant to go connect with someone else. Why should I leave the room?”
“It's a fine line to walk some days. I love barging into rooms and just seeing what people are doing, but I know sometimes it's off-putting, because I'm just like, ‘I just want to see what's going on here because you're all great teachers’. I want to see what life looks like in another room, because I only know what I teach. I don't know what another classroom even looks like unless I walk in.”
SHARING WITH STUDENTS: ADVISING CLUBS
“Once, a student approached me and said, ‘Hey, we're starting a ping-pong club. Will you be the advisor for it?’ ‘Fine. You fill out the paperwork and try and get approved and when you get it all done I'll sign it’—thinking they're not going to get it done. And then they came to with the form going, ‘We filled it out. It's going to be approved.’ I'm like, I should have held my tongue. But hey, it was a great club that ran for two great years that everybody loved.”
“I love that they just approach me (….) They read me really well in that situation. They know I never say no.”
SHARING WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL
“It's my support outside the room. When I leave the building, it's the people who are not in my eight-hour day at work. Of course, that's my fiancée. But it's also my parents and my sister (…) My sister and my mom were both educators. So it's family who is out of the classroom, but still knows what life was like (….) I can rant and talk, and share my excitement with them because they understand that same joy and that same agony.”
“I think there's also the beauty of people who are not teachers and explaining to them what my day looks like, because if you're not in the classroom, you might think, ‘Oh, you can just show movies all day and just do these little activities.’ But there's a lot—of course it's much deeper than that. But some people have no idea, So it's fun (…) It's like, ‘Oh, let me tell you this crazy story about my class today.’”
“I can share what I do with people--the people who are teachers and the people who are nowhere near the education world."
“If I'm not thinking about it, I'm thinking about something else that's bizarre or weird, or something else I'm going to hyper-focus on, too. So let me hyper focus on my job for a bit.”