DEVELOPING A NICHE
“I was hired [by my previous school] right out of college—actually, during college—and I was there for five years. I got hired originally to teach Conceptual Physics—so lower than Regents-Level Physics, for people who just need the credit—and Marine Biology—which I have no certification in, but that's okay. And within half a year, but before midterms were over, I was approached to teach the A.P. Physics One course due to the unforeseen circumstance of a teacher leaving. So from then forward I am teaching A.P. Physics for the next four-and-a-half years, to the point where I'm almost the only teacher who teaches it (….) So I carve out a huge niche in the program of the school before i'm even tenured.”
“Then I also started getting involved in clubs. I was part of a chess club I started, there's a video game club that I ran for a little bit, a startup ping-pong club—so always into extracurriculars. I even played trumpet with the the school band in one situation. Part of my teaching is always get involved with the kids and I don't care what it is. I'll be there—games, sports, events, theater. I will show up.”
“And then, you know, the pandemic hits. So we teach through that. And we figure out, ‘How do I do this curriculum I've only done once, maybe only really half of a year before? And how do we figure out how to do it digitally now?’ So that became a really adaptive year. And I loved my students. I loved my coworkers.”
“As time went on, I thought, I don't want to be here forever. I don't see myself being here for the next thirty plus years. So I started looking and I found [my current school] (…) and I applied and got the job there. So now I'm teaching Regents Physics in a school that's much bigger—almost twice the size of the high school population from one school to the next.”
DECISION TO CHANGE SCHOOLS
“I started talking to my colleagues more and more, and you get these subtle hints of people saying, ‘Why are you still here?’ So you want to go somewhere different. It's one thing when maybe you're asking yourself (…) ‘Is there somewhere else I'm looking for?’, but when you get it from not just one colleague, but multiple (….) They keep saying the same thing—'You're so young, go somewhere different.’ Maybe there's something here that I don't see, right?”
“And I think, ‘I'm just teaching. I'm loving what I'm doing. The kids are good. I'm doing what I love doing. I'm teaching Ap Physics as a second year teacher. What more could I ask for?”
“But then I started seeing things that my school wasn't doing for me. Maybe they weren't supporting me as much. They weren't giving me good opportunities to grow. If I wanted to take Continuing Ed classes, I was getting pushback on which classes were being accepted. So I was saying, ‘Maybe this isn't the place for me to grow as much as I can.’”
“I talked about this with [a teacher firend] for a little bit. ‘Have you carved out where you want to be? You're happy with what you're doing, but knowing they like you and you're the only guy doing it, they're not going to question what you're doing, because it's just you.’ So I was like, ‘Oh, my God, you're right! I've been doing the same lesson four years in a row because no one said it's not a great lesson or nothing (….) No one's questioning because no one wants to challenge me on it, because they either don't know my content or they don't see anything.”
“So when I came to [my current school], all of a sudden there are nine other Physics teachers with me, multiple people teaching Regents. It's like, ‘Oh! Ha! I can't just be my own guy!' I mean, I can be, but somebody might say, ‘Hey, I'm trying this out. You should look into that, too.’
“When I saw that I was like, ‘Oh. This was the right move.”
“Now I've been here for just my second year, and still involved with a bunch of different groups, carving out my niche in the school. It's been a fun journey, really.”