Last night I went and saw a friend who was in NYC over her school break. She's now a 7th Grade math teacher out in Watts/Gompers in Los Angeles. While the stories she told about her kids -- good, bad, sad, humorous -- were even beyond most things I've experienced while teaching, that is not what I noticed most about the night.
Last night the people that had gathered to see their friend who was in town were from many different points in her life: Middle school/High school (me), college, and teaching. Yet, each one of those people seemed to have a snapshot of her life as what they knew about her -- even if they had heard a few stories over time, or kept in touch sporadically after our closest years, as I have with her.
I learned from listening to others about her college years, which in reality are all but left out of my experiences with her, and paid close attention to how things are going in her first year of teaching -- especially in comparison to mine. I think its a good thing in some sense that a person can often times be a new person as they move through life into different places -- even if they are not really "new," just placed into different settings, different environments.
Its Friday at school, and thus a much needed Test Day. Good luck students.
A 22-year-old first year high school teacher in the Bronx, living in New York for the first time...making sure to write about things that have little to do with the former and everything to do with the latter
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