The Introverted Thinker is 24.
She is working as a teacher, 8th grade, for Teach for America, over 1000 miles away. She is in a STEM school, mostly Hispanic and Black kids. For her first year she is paired with a math teacher. They are tasked with writing a computer class for the 8th grade and 155 kids sign up.
They write the class weekly. The IT teaches it on Mondays and then has office hours. She practices the class on me and mutters, "I'll have to give THAT more time." when I am slow. She teaches some math as well and works on the graduate school classes at night.
She calls me. "Mom, I am wondering about E."
"Mmm-hmm."
"Well, did you deliberately pick the only family in town that was Hispanic and African American to baby sit me?"
I laugh. "No. I hadn't even thought of that. I didn't notice. E. worked at the daycare and had two teen daughters and I liked her. So we got to know them." Convenient too, since they lived 4 blocks away.
"Humph." says my daughter. She is struggling some, it's a rough time to start teaching. I ask last year if she likes it and she replies, "We are teaching remotely and it's all messed up. How can I tell?"
By the end of last summer she has her teaching certificate and this year she is teaching live, 160 8th graders in three classes for computers.
My son and I ask how it's going.
"Well," she says, "Usually 2 out of 25 Kindergarteners cry because they miss home. Right now they've been home for 2 years and 24 out of 25 cry." She says that the 8th graders are all acting out correspondingly more.
"They are supposed to be masked and distanced. I walk in the room when I am covering two home rooms and two of them are kissing. I just say that is not distancing and separate them."
Maybe this will mean that teaching will get easier. I do not know. Probably not. She says the home stories she hears are way worse than the ones among the children in our small town from when she was in school. She is doing what she can. We all are, right?
giron