Reading is Always an Answer

Memoir Monday

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

The trajectory of my career in education took a winding path over 26 years. From my freshman year at Ball State University, I developed and recognized my strengths of teaching people to read and write and how to make workshops and lessons interesting and valuable to individuals.

I went to Ball State because I researched it was the university who placed the most teachers successfully after graduation. It also was a state school for me which made it cheaper.

I visited my junior year of high school and it felt like home.

I wanted to be a teacher early. I only wavered on the “What do you want to be when you grow up?” question once or twice. (A radiologist and a therapist were the alternatives.)

I made the decision to pursue different interests in college than in high school. I traded swimming for residence hall government and opening committee. I traded German club for educational organizations. I loved the “make it and take it” meetings hosted by a teacher college club. I made copies of MAILBOX magazine projects to make for my future classroom.

I began my career in elementary, moved to middle school and coaching and back to love of little ones in kindergarten to end my career in coaching again, but in a different state.

Licensing in education is state-specific. Wisconsin and Indiana are reciprocal states so it was possible to transfer my credentials, but it cost me. I pursued a reading specialists degree with my elementary education credentials.

I believe reading is the gateway to everything else.

Teaching well is about nuance and knowing the guidance and decisions that need to be made in a moment, usually with chaos surrounding you. (Have you been in a room with twenty-five 5 and 6-year-olds?) Many decisions are difficult to anticipate because the interest and experience level varies so much from student to student.

I look back to my beginning years teaching and wish I would have journaled the micromovements of teaching kids to find their voice, especially in writing. Their excitement of the share, of what they had to say and the listening. The movement of seeing the improvement of the writing just a little bit at a time until it takes on a new life.

When I taught first grade my students composed a group chart response to a read aloud every morning in Family Meeting. Then they went directly to their notebooks. Some days they would continue the group chart in their notebooks, or just practice writing, or write something new.

Some days it was awesome. Some days it was hard. Sometimes it was connected and sometimes not. Just like adult writers.

My students wrote every day and they published. They made their own books. I taught them to use PowerPoint to make them. I hung their writing on the shelves above their coats in the hallway. People stopped and read it.

We knew people read it because they would comment to me or my students when we were walking in the hallways. But during one math lesson, a fellow teacher burst into my room with a raised frustrated voice. I was teaching from my overhead projector, explaining how to borrow, and why it is called that. She exclaimed, “HOW did you get them to do this?” pointing to the hallway from the doorway. Her students were a grade above and not writing as well as mine.

My children stared at her and I was just as stunned. I told her we could talk about it at another time, but I had to get back to math right now. We never did have that conversation. She was angry my children could produce this type of work. This attitude was one I never could understand as I progressed through my teaching years. Despite what my methods classes proclaimed at university, competition between teachers was real and sometimes cutthroat and vindictive.

A pivotal moment is the day I arranged a writer's circle on the floor. I taught the students the technique of sharing a “glow” and a “grow” for the writing that was shared. After one example, they took over the conversation and didn’t need me. I backed out of the circle and watched. They didn’t need me to do anything. That was a moment I didn’t know what I had done to get them here but I wanted to figure it out and keep doing it.

I wanted my students to write when I wasn’t there. I had to attend several days of meetings one time and came back to a printed story of “Mrs Zack Is Missing” [my name at the time] on my desk modeled after the picture book, Miss Nelson is Missing.

My main goal as a teacher was to teach them to be readers and writers. I modeled it every day and they produced happily. It wasn’t about the standards that would come, and I knew it.

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Personally, I am a reader and a writer. I never ask my students (no matter their age) to do anything I have not done myself, or am willing to do. This is a mantra I found myself repeating aloud.

I do not believe in busy work. I didn’t want to grade it, and I didn’t like it given to me. I believe in being transparent with students and explaining why we are doing something. I listened to what they said and reacted accordingly. I am not afraid to ask a question and not know the answer that will come from the students. I want to show students how to struggle with new learning.

I WILL NOT ASK YOU TO DO ANYTHING THAT I AM NOT WILLING TO DO MYSELF, OR HAVEN’T ALREADY DONE. - My Mantra

Reading changed the trajectory of my life

I am an anomaly in my family. Outsiders perceive my associations and mindsets to be quite different from the people who raised me. On several occasions, people have met my parents and asked me later “How do you come from those people?”

Maybe if they had met my Oma, who I spent the bulk of my formative years with, they would understand the discrepency.

A couple of years ago a friend and colleague and I were in conversation about career paths, life decisions, waiting, and life. We both remarked how different we were from our siblings who we grew up with in the same house and with the same parents. Then the conversation moved to my love of asking a great question. One, in particular, I love to ask is what their first reading memory is. I also say it can be a positive or a negative one, just the first one they can recall. The reaction and answer is either a dramatic story of happiness or a dreaded and horrific story of a novel or text that teachers made them read that they hated. It is ALWAYS a strong emotion – passion vs hate. It is fascinating to me.

I never made the connection between being different from my family and reading.

The weekend before, I had met this same friend for coffee in Chicago at a quaint little shop down the street from several independent bookstores. The discussion of the reading question continued.

A sudden startled look on her face as we sipped our lattes demonstrated a connection for her. She bluntly said, “You do realize that the answer to your own question and fascination with reading is why you are so different than your circumstances. Your own reading life and patterns changed the trajectory of your life. You didn’t want to settle for just what you already knew.”

Ironic when someone else points out your own motivations.

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Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.