Standing Up

When you think about a teacher, what traits do you think of?

Kind? Knowledgable? Caring? Assertive?

If you know anything about me, you know that being assertive is not high on the list of my natural traits. Despite my ability to be firm when working with students, adults are a whole new ballgame. But it's an important trait to have; one that I developed more at my second school.

I worked at a Dual Language Immersion School, where my students learned in Spanish and English daily. Since I was one of the few upper elementary teachers who was returning for the next school year, I was moved from fifth grade to third grade - and I was the team lead.

I was terrified. I was only in my third year of teaching, and I thought there was a lot that I had to learn before being a team lead. After all, the position came with lots of additional responsibilities that felt overwhelming when I was just getting a handle on being a classroom teacher. In addition, I was working with two teachers from Puerto Rico, and I was expected to put things in place to help them acclimate to the school and the district.

Thankfully, they turned out to be some of my favorite co-workers ever. We joked that we were sister wives, the two of us sharing the male teacher on our team. We also told the students that we were all like their parents. We worked so well together, covering each other's flaws and helping each other to become better at what we did. It was funny since I was the youngest and least experienced on the team.

This was especially important because we didn't quite know what we were getting ourselves into with the third-grade classes.

Our structure was this; we had three periods each day. I taught English language arts. Mrs. T taught Spanish Language Arts and Science (in English). Mr. I taught Math, Social Studies, and Health in Spanish. We would switch classes three times a day,so that the students would be receiving instruction in both languages every day. This required us to be in constant communication with each other about curriculum pacing, student behavior, and parent contact, as well as admin updates.

At times I would find myself overwhelmed, but my teammates were always there to pick up the slack.

Now, let me tell you about this particular group of students. Their class was the one that founded the Spanish Immersion program at the school, so their parents felt...privileged. Previous principals had done all that they could to appease the parents, knowing that if enrollment fell, the program wouldn't survive.

Most of the parents were appreciative, doing all that they could to support both their students and their teachers.

But there were a few who expected things to always go their way.

One child was notoriously lazy, refusing to complete assignments even when given extra support. When his grade suffered, I was called into meeting after meeting with administration and his mom, where I was expected to put supports into place to help him improve. One meeting with just the principal and I turned into a disagreement about whose responsibility it was to collect student work; she claimed I must have done something wrong, and I reminded her that I had routines that put the responsibility on the students to turn in their work. The student was given opportunities to redo his work, but when he invariably didn’t, his grade remained the same.

There was another student whose parents worked in the school district, and they expected us to bend over backward to support their student. Their student had accommodations that were followed and documented, but the child simply had no interest in doing work and expected things to be done for her.

Again we were pulled into meetings, asked to change the child’s grade. My principal asked me to discuss it with my team and set up a meeting with them and her to decide if we should change her grade (with a heavy implication that we should).

I brought it to my team, holding my thoughts until I heard from them. To my relief, they were in agreement with me that we’d given the child the grade she’d earned, and we wouldn’t be changing anything.

A couple of days later while I was with my class, the principal came to my door and asked if we could set up the meeting time. I surprised myself by telling her that I didn’t see the point in another meeting since we’d already said that we weren’t changing the grade. She also seemed surprised and stuttered that the parents were likely to go above our heads and have them changed. I shrugged and went back to my class.

They did, in fact, go above our heads and change the grade. But it was so fulfilling to have stood my ground on something that I felt strongly about and to have the support of my team.

The team support was especially helpful when we had data meetings - where we looked at student testing data and had conversations about where students needed more support and how that support would look, as well as celebrating growth. In one meeting, I shared what the team had come to a consensus on: our students were lazy. There was no other explanation, as we’d used multiple ways to teach concepts and ideas, and yet the students still weren’t performing on the state tests. The principal immediately shut that idea down, telling us that we shouldn’t blame the students and we need to be reflective of ourselves as teachers.

My team was behind me as we showed the evidence of the different ways we’d tried to teach and support the students, explaining that we’d been trying everything that we could. We left that meeting frustrated, but still united as a team and proud of ourselves for speaking up.

It’s been years since I left that school at the end of that year. But though I still was not the teacher who was the loudest or most forceful, I’ve found that I can use my voice and put my foot down if I need to.

So while “assertive” isn’t quite the first word that people think of when they’re describing me, I’m proud that it’s still a part of me.