What I'm up to Now

Hi there. All the posts below this one chronicle the painfully slow process by which a first year teacher completed the 2005-2006 school year.

I am she, and I survived that year. In my second year of teaching, things got much easier. By my third, I was actually pretty good. After my fourth, I was ready for a change.

So I moved across the country to go to graduate school in California. Now, I work at a middle school in Oakland, where I launched a new site for the fantastic youth development program Citizen Schools. For more about me now, look here.

The rest of this blog is just as I left it in June of 2006. It is certainly a commentary on my own privilege that I can say this:

My first year of teaching remains the hardest year of my life.

I was not good at it. I got better because I had good coaches, healthy doses of both shame and stubbornness, and because I came back for a second year. It's a bit hard for me to read some of this now. I've left it in the hope that other first year teachers will feel, as I did, the need to do whatever it takes to improve their practice, and to do this work as well as possible for as long as possible. Our students' lives depend on it.

Thanks for reading,

Macy Parker