Final Narrative

I have always loved stories.

Reading a book with my grandmother and big sister

Perhaps because I am the child of two former stage actors, framing life through a narrative arc has always made things a little easier to understand. As a kid, I did musical theater, immersing myself fully in my roles, living out the character I was playing on stage. In college, I studied English literature, spending four years deeply entrenched in novels and unpacking their connotative meanings and cultural significance. When I graduated, I went into the film industry, thinking that was the path on which I could continue unfurling the pages of my own story, living vicariously through the tales of movie characters. 

Visiting Stratford-upon-Avon, hometown of William Shakespeare

But then, for two years, the pages stopped turning. It felt as though the author of my life had writer’s block. Everything in my life felt stunted. I was running through my routine like a montage. I woke up, went to work, did my passionless job, went home, and repeated the cycle the next day. The only difference was that this month didn’t span the length of a paragraph or the tenure of a catchy song--it seemed to never end. I realized that my own story wasn’t following the narrative arc that I had anticipated, and I had to change the trajectory of the main character, or she would never learn and grow as the author had hoped.

In 2019, I went to Maine on a whim, after booking an impulsive trip to spend the Fourth of July with childhood friends I hadn’t seen in years, inspired by a dream I had in which we revisited the camp where we had all grown up together. On that trip, I heard a voice, clear as day, tell me that I was where I was supposed to be, but I needed to be teaching. I recognized the voice. It was that of my grandmother, who herself had taught seventh grade for nearly forty years before passing away in 2013. It was at that moment that I realized that this elusive author of my story was, in fact, me.

(I like to think my grandma was just playing publisher right then.) 

The writer’s block suddenly ceased. I started rewriting the second act of my story. I applied to Teach For America, a non-profit organization that strives for educational equity by which I had been recruited my senior year of college, but had skirted in favor of the bright lights of Hollywood. I was accepted to teach in the Rhode Island region, a state I had never so much as set foot in, but saw as the perfect blank page for the next chapter of my story. I took ownership of my narrative and the words began to flow.

With every story, however, there are peaks and valleys in the plot, and my first year in the classroom so effortlessly sculpted both the peaks and valleys for me. I cannot even begin to encapsulate the growth I experienced in my first year of teaching. Having grown up in New England, I boldly assumed that I was well-equipped to begin my teaching tenure at Mount Pleasant High School, where nearly 90% of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch and almost 40% are classified as multilingual learners. I had no idea what that meant in the context of my student population or teaching experience. I could never have anticipated what that chapter would look like. I had no idea how I’d write it.

What I’ve realized, upon reflecting, is that I didn’t write that chapter on my own--I wrote it with the help of my students. My students are, to put it simply, the best. I have never known love like I felt for all 118 of the kids on my roster last year. I did not know that I was capable of the depth of emotion I felt until I saw them succeed, or falter, or laugh, or cry, or celebrate, or despair, and I felt it right alongside them. My students are my “why,” as Simon Sinek urges us to identify. The greatest joy I could ever hope to know is seeing them achieve their goals. They are the reason I go to school everyday, beaming with gratitude that I get to do what I do. The relationships that I build with them are the fuel that I need to make it through the long day. They became such an inherent part of who I was as a teacher and a person, so it only made sense that they became co-authors in my story.

I feel, as a teacher, an immense sense of responsibility, not only to teach my kids the content in the curriculum and the skills they need to succeed as productive members of society, but how to be authors of their own stories. I want to help them discover the amazing qualities I know that they possess that ultimately dispose them to be authors of their own captivating tales. In my classroom this year, there were hopeful doctors, teachers, architects, truck drivers, chefs, fashion designers, sports analysts, Army troops, movie stars, fashion journalists--and that isn’t even the complete list of the main characters in the stories that are being written by the students I had the honor and privilege to teach last year. There is a duality in being a teacher, in that as much as you teach your students how to succeed in the classroom, you can also help them thrive outside of school, and as much as you teach them in those regards, they teach you.

So I let them help me write my story, while doing my best to give them material for theirs as well. To me, being a teacher is so much more than a curriculum. As educators, it is imperative that we recognize our students not just as learners, but humans too, engaging their whole being in a way that helps them grow as citizens of the world. I think of Mike Wesch, and how he suggested educators participate in “anti-teaching” and let students lead their own learning. I feel that this is best practice when it comes to letting my students weave their narratives in and out of my classroom. I want them to ask the big questions and pursue the passion that will fill their pages. On my end, I want to hear my students and give them the space to make choices about their own education in a way that suits them and uniquely supports them in their whole story--not just one chapter. 

I’ve thought a lot about what I can do to lead my students to material that fills their pages. While I grew up in New England, my own high school chapter deviated greatly from anything my students may write. I grew up in an affluent, suburban district, where the staggering majority of students were white. Everyone spoke English as their first language; many of us elected to take Latin, a dead language, as our foreign language elective. College was not an option; it was a given. It was an educational narrative with privilege in the text and between the lines, no matter how you spun it.

I teach a population of almost exclusively multilingual learners. Many of them immigrated to the United States within the past five years. Many of them work a full-time job outside of school to financially support their families. Many of them speak absolutely no English, but they come to school day after day, working tirelessly to learn, before going onto a job, where they work tirelessly to earn. I have never seen resilience demonstrated the way that I have in my students, and I’ve realized that they are already filling their pages with their strength. They are my “why” because they show me every day what it means to be a lifelong learner and an admirable and honorable human, and I have so much to learn from them in that respect.

I believe that teaching and learning is reciprocal. That is the core of my teaching philosophy. I am as much a student as the pupils that sit before me every day, and they are as much teachers as any faculty member in my building. We cannot be effective educators if we are not willing to remember what it is like to learn, or how to learn. Our students cannot understand our purpose as teachers if they have never been given the opportunity to see what it’s like from the other side. Wesch tells us to let our students guide their learning and ask the big questions, and I fully see the merit. We are, ultimately, co-authors in the story of our classroom, and I believe that it is at that intersection that learning happens most fruitfully.

When I consider this reciprocity in the specific context of my classroom, I think a lot about what I have learned from my students by way of digital media and technology. I, for the majority of the year, operated as a techno-traditionalist per Scott Noon’s parameters, trying valiantly to fit in the digital natives that filled my classroom. They so graciously helped me navigate my technological missteps, gently urging me to post the attendance for that day or whispering to me that the sound wasn’t really working on a video. As much as I cherished those moments--as I do every moment with my kids--I couldn’t help but feel that technology, as profound a tool as it is, really presented a barrier in building relationships this past year. 

I was fortunate enough to have my students with me, physically in the classroom, for the majority of the year, but I felt that the pressure to use Google Classroom, Screencastify, or other tech tools as the main vehicle of our instruction impeded the sanctity of the relationships built through instructional moments. I believe that media and technology are fantastic assets to the field of education, but if we have learned anything this past year, it is that--to echo the sentiments of Sherry Turkle--media and technology could never hope to replace the relationships we foster with our students or the critical thinking that together, we are capable of carrying out.

When I think about how to use technology next year in a way that does not impede my relationships within my students, but rather urges my students to ask the big questions and consider their own place in their learning, I am not just looking at my students in the context of my own classroom. I am looking at them as lifelong learning, humans, and global citizens. I want the media that I show them to be representative of their identities and their stories. I want to introduce them to technology that expands their worldview and coaxes out those big questions about life. 

I decided to explore Google Earth as a potential tech tool in my classroom because it felt like not only a great tool for engaging my students with the stories we explore in class, but their own stories as well. I can invite them on virtual field trips to settings detailed in whatever novel we’re exploring, and they can use Google Earth to show me settings of significance to them and their lives. They can plan out grand itineraries for the places they hope to visit someday, and include in their unique narrative. I feel as though Google Earth is a tech tool capable of expanding worldviews and mindsets, and there is a lot of power in that notion. It’s a chance to dig into the humanity of a story and immerse ourselves in the text, just as we can do with each other’s narratives. 

In that reciprocity of teaching and learning, there is also a reciprocity of relationships. It serves to inspire us to write and share our stories with each other, which is my ultimate hope for my students--to feel that they are heard. The reciprocity of relationships is such that your students will make space for a relationship with you to grow if you make that same space for them. Vulnerability, which is the keystone of relationship building, is a cycle of trust and openness, but your students will not know that space exists to be vulnerable if you do not help them find it. 

So share your story with your students. Open up the book and let them thumb through. You never know what wonder they may add to the pages.