At my second school (…) a majority of the students were not [engaged with the content] for a variety of reasons, the most prevalent being English language. It was a major barrier and the only way I could really bridge that—because I was not an English language teacher, I was a History teacher—was to provide full-on bilingual courses. So powerpoints would be in Mandarin Chinese and in English. Worksheets would be in English and on the other side Mandarin Chinese. And so that was the safety net to get students to engage. But then, of course, there were students who did not want to engage—phones in class, just joshing around with friends, just not attending class, walking into class whenever they'd like, walking out of class whenever they'd like. And that was extremely trying, extremely frustrating, especially as a newer teacher.”
“Just trying to figure out, ‘How can I make this work?’ and that reality, that day-to-day, was kind of a driver for me to further develop my pedagogy.”
“How can I make this classroom more engaging, so that it's not students sitting and listening and being passive, but students creating and doing, so that there is no downtime? So the downtime is them thinking of how to accomplish the goal, communicating with their peers about what to do next, to achieve something together. And while (…) it was a lot of trial and error, those three years did help me to cultivate a foundation that I could really begin to apply starting last year [in my current] school.”
“ I guess it goes back to the growth mindset (…) Take a challenge and incorporate it into improving yourself. I had an idea I wanted to be a teacher since I was a Sophomore in high school. So I kind of realized that this isn't something I just wanted to give up on because it's difficult. I think my experience in scouting also relates to that, because of the sense of discipline and sense of effort, and really just getting your hands dirty to accomplish something and succeed at it.”