I have been teaching high school for 11 years now, which is weird to say, honestly. When I started, I felt like a “first year teacher” for at least five years. I spent the next couple of years in some kind of mixture between impostor syndrome (wait… I’m the adult in the room? Who do I answer to?) and complete reverie (they actually pay me to do this– I just get to talk about English all day with awesome kids who never make life boring!).
Recently, though, I was given the amazing opportunity of becoming department chair, which gave me an opportunity to support and lead other teachers, and seemed to come with a modicum of power as well. It seemed like the best of both worlds– I could still teach my own kiddos, but I could also start to make all of those oh-so-needed changes that my friends and I had been complaining about for years.
I soon learned, however, that there is little (read: no) power in middle management, and now I am responsible for enforcing some of those very same policies that I hated as a teacher. I spend a lot of my free (and working…) time thinking about how things would be different if I ran the place. If there weren’t politics and 14 layers of management above my head, and if every value of my school aligned with my personal values.
I know that every teacher has their ideas of how education could get better if only…
These are mine.
