My first summer during college, I worked at the Atlanta Community Food Bank with middle schoolers, running a summer meals stand. I loved spending time with them organizing activities, and there was something really energizing for me about working with kids.
The rest of my college summers, I worked at a camp or a student-focused organization. I spent the summer of 2020 doing reading lessons with a group of middle schoolers. We were reading Bud, Not Buddy, and I had one student who loved the story, but he was struggling to sound out the words and getting frustrated. I just remember being struck by a sense of how unfair that was, and I didn’t have the skills or knowledge to really help him. And I thought about my own childhood, and all of the books that I loved effortlessly. And I knew that I wanted to learn how to help him read.
Teaching stood out to me as a way to do something good in the world in a way that had a really tangible impact. I liked the idea of working directly in service of students, where I would be able to see the benefits and the results.
I majored in sociology in college, so I had a big focus on racial justice and class inequality; specifically, how that can lead to wildly different levels of resources in different schools. I was lucky to go to a well-resourced school and have a fantastic education with teachers who I look back on and think, ‘That person changed my life and turned me into who I became.’ I’ve also seen and been in some schools where that is just not the case. It’s the total opposite. I think part of me simply wanted to be one of those good teachers for a student who may not have had that experience during their time in education.
I was lucky enough to have access to really high-quality teachers who cared about me, invested in me, and made my time in school fun and enjoyable. I was lucky to walk into school every day and feel welcome and like that was a place for me… and I’m grateful to my parents for raising me to want to make a difference in the world in some small way.
My dad was in the first year of Teach For America. He taught for three years, but eventually left to go to law school and became a lawyer. I really love hearing his stories from his classroom. That was definitely another part of what first got me interested in teaching.
My mom worked in nonprofits most of my life, and I definitely was more interested in what my mom was doing. I thought it was so cool to be able to point to something you’ve done in your work and say, ‘The world is a tiny bit better than it was yesterday because of what I did there.’ I really like that. She worked in public policy, which I thought I might be interested in for a while. I worked on some campaigns in Georgia, in high school and college, and decided that that wasn’t for me. It was a little too high stress, and I felt like I wasn’t seeing the impact of my work.
When I was graduating in 2021, a teaching recruitment program reached out to me. They had a strong focus on working with teachers to be the best resource possible for a diverse array of students, and I was attracted to that focus on equity. The program (City Teaching Alliance) involved a year of student teaching, and I was able to get as much practice as I could before being thrown into a classroom. I was lucky to choose a program that prepared me really well. I don’t think I’d do anything differently if I were approaching teaching again, because practicing with a mentor before you have your own classroom is really, really important and was really valuable for me. I absolutely would not change that.
I felt like my teacher training aligned with my values of not assuming that I could just jump into a classroom. The program had a strong emphasis on learning about your students and your classroom, and also reflecting on how you’re showing up as a teacher every day.
That work of reflection and constant learning is still important to me. I don’t ever want to get stuck and just assume that I’m doing good work—it’s important to me to ask myself how I’m doing, and what I could be doing better.
When I first started my teaching program, we had a class on race, culture, and equity in education. We talked about how things like classroom management can become unequal and can treat different students really unfairly. We read testimonials from teachers who were trying new and exciting ways to think about things like, ‘What is my role as a teacher? What does classroom management look like for me, particularly building relationships with students?’ Everybody says, ‘Oh, you’ve got to build relationships with your kids.’ Going through a student teaching program actually gave me concrete ways to do that, and helped me think about how I would do that.
One way I love to connect with students is through music. I always ask what they want to listen to as much as I can. I’ll try to play the songs in class. I have them write in a journal too, and I’ll read their journals and ask questions about what they’re up to outside of class. It’s important to me to know them outside of the classroom to connect these experiences to school in a valuable way.
I knew I wanted to teach high school because I like that high schoolers are becoming the people that they’re going to be. I get to teach every 12th grader that comes through this school building, and I get to do things like help them with their college essays, apply for internships, write a cover letter—everything.
I think that watching them grow right as they’re about to leave high school and be a person out in the world is really special and feels rewarding to me. It feels really valuable to me.
I had a student who was kicked out of her house by her mom and was sleeping on the couch of a friend for basically the end of her senior year, and the school really helped her out with resources for food and finding housing. She made it through the school year, sleeping on this couch, and over the summer, she got placed with an apartment through a Baltimore city housing program.
She texted me and a colleague, and we collected a bunch of furniture and knick-knacks and stuff and brought it over in a U-Haul and helped her move into her apartment. She was so excited—she’d just started a healthcare job training program. (I think she finished it recently, actually.) She texted me on the first day of school this year and said something like, ‘Happy first day of school. I bet you’re really going through it right now, but I hope you’ll remember me and how much you helped me. Without a teacher like you, I wouldn’t be where I am today.’
That’s an extreme example of how much you can mean to some students. I was teaching second period when that text came in, and I just started crying. This job allows you to build close relationships with people who really need close relationships.
I wish people understood how hard it is and how much time it requires. I think that teachers get very little respect in our society as the highly educated, prepared people that they are. I have had some moments where I’ve told friends or family members who aren’t teachers, ‘Oh, I’m really struggling right now. I’m not doing well,’ and I’ve noticed that they kind of just don’t get it.
If you haven’t been in a classroom, it’s hard to understand everything that’s asked of you on a day-to-day basis. Every day, I have only 90 minutes to prepare for two different 90-minute classes. I also have to grade and give feedback, and there’s all kinds of paperwork outside of teaching that I have to do, and there just isn’t enough time.
That can be frustrating for someone who’s passionate and energetic. You can get the sense that you aren’t being given the time to do the job to the best of your ability, which is really hard. I wish I saw more interest in making schools a humanizing place to work.
Teachers are not paid in a way that recognizes the level of education or work that’s required. When you increase teacher pay, you get more people who are interested in teaching, and less work falls on the people who are here. We’ve had teachers leave, and someone has to pick up their work when they leave; having more paid educators in a building makes it easier for everyone else.
There’s not the political willingness to put funding where it needs to go so that that can happen. But I really think you can’t improve our education system without starting by simply paying people for the amount of work that they are going to have to put into the job.
I’ve been serving as a host teacher for a resident through my teacher training program, and having her here as a co-teacher has been a revival for me. She’s helped me keep things fun in class this year, partly because she’s just a really fun person and teacher, but also because having her in the room gives me a little more room to breathe. I have more time for the parts of teaching that I really love, but that tend to slip through the cracks when I’m overworked and exhausted. For example, I really like incorporating music and lyrics into our lessons, or just generally making connections to students’ interests. I think that’s definitely one of my strengths as a teacher, but it’s so rare that I really have the time to do it.
Especially with the number of students that can be on a roster—sometimes pushing 30, and I know of schools where it’s far beyond that—having just one adult in the room is a disservice to the students. By having a co-teaching model, we can serve students better. Again, you have to have the money to hire enough teachers to do that, which is just not the reality right now.
Anything that can be done to lessen the workload would make this profession more attractive to young people. It tends to push away really talented, passionate young people who start this job and then realize, ‘I can’t do a good job with the amount of time that’s given to me.
Our school has lead. Not lead paint, as far as I’m aware, but there’s lead in the pipes, so we can’t drink the tap water in the building. The city has assured us it’s safe to wash our hands with it, and I believe them, but that’s one of the more shocking facts about our school and its limited resources.
It seems like such a basic thing in this day and age that, like every school in America, this school should probably have water coming out of a tap that can be drunk. But that is not the reality, and I can’t imagine that it would ever change unless they demolish the building and build something new.
Baltimore definitely has fewer resources than many other school districts. Our school struggles to have the basic extracurriculars. Lots of the afterschool programs that we do offer are provided through community partners; the district won’t fund it. Kids can play sports through some really complicated team forming with other schools, but we’ve struggled to have any sort of club. One person started an anime club, and that’s one of very few afterschool programs that are available, and that does kind of come down to resources and funding. I think that cutting funding for schools is an intentional choice that has been made over our country’s history and results in these really desperate situations in schools.
I think blaming and being worried about ‘this generation of kids’ is the wrong way to frame it. I think we are absolutely experiencing a crisis in the American public education system, with a total lack of resources and support, leading to students who are struggling and not being prepared in the way that they should be, and I only see that getting worse in the future.
It’s important to recognize that the students themselves are not the problem. They come in here every day, excited to learn and passionate, and they have, in many ways, been denied access to resources, and that happens along racial lines and class lines and based on zip codes.
Social media, cellphones, and unlimited access to devices have been damaging for young people by design. Social media platforms are designed to latch on to people and keep them hooked, and it can be really difficult to try to convince a child that they even have a problem with social media.
I think it’s unfair to put the responsibility for managing cellphones on the teacher. On top of everything else I have to do in a day, now I have to call home to the 15 families of kids who just wouldn’t put their phones away that day. To me, that stands out as something that someone else should be doing.
Part of what makes the job difficult is that you are teaching grade-level content to many students who haven’t been fully equipped to grapple with it and engage with it. For example, trying to teach Shakespeare’s Othello to a student who has been denied the ability to grow beyond an elementary reading level is not impossible, and in fact it’s really important for helping that student grow as a reader, but it’s difficult and makes the job really, really hard. I think it’s hard to relate to what a teacher goes through in their day to day work until you’ve tried to do that.
In my class, I try to address that. I have a huge classroom library. When I started teaching, I asked for donations on my Instagram, and was totally blown away by the support I got. Like, people I hadn’t spoken to since high school were coming out of the woodwork to send me $20 to buy books and other supplies for my kids.
I go to Goodwill every weekend and buy more books that I think kids will be interested in. We do some independent reading time on Fridays. There’s no better feeling than suggesting a book to a student, and being right—they do enjoy it. I’ve had students tell me the last time they liked reading something in school was in middle school, or that it’s just never happened for them.
I focus on what can be done. How can I get a book into a kid’s hand that they’re gonna really enjoy and want to read? That is much more valuable than focusing on how the kids haven’t ever read a book.
Teaching is difficult, but it is also pretty special to be able to contribute to the growth of another human being. I see kids improve their reading and writing. They’re thinking critically in concrete ways as they go through my classroom, whether they’re here for a semester or a whole year, depending on the class they’re in. I would have quit a long time ago if I didn’t experience their passion.
Many students are applying to college or trade school or figuring out what job they’re going to work after high school. It’s such an important phase in their lives to be talking with them and creating opportunities for them to talk amongst each other. It’s valuable for me to be here and be a positive support that they can rely on if they need anything related to that transition. I’ve loved that.
It’s important to have positive, helpful mentors in schools. I am so grateful to my host teacher for all the help she gave me during my first year. I think that those mentorship roles often go to people who are willing to give extra assistance to people on their own time, and I wish that there was more institutional support for that kind of thing, outside of someone just volunteering out of the goodness of their heart. I’m also really grateful to my City Teaching Alliance coach, who I couldn’t have stayed in teaching without. I’m very happy that I’ve gotten to grow into a position where I can help her provide mentoring for new teachers coming through the program.
In high school, my debate coach let us call him by his first name, which was scandalous at the time. It’s a silly, small thing, but I think it showed a level of mutual respect that was important and that is not always present in a classroom.
Sometimes, we have this approach to teaching or classroom management where the teacher is a little impersonal and just supposed to be respected because they’re the teacher. I want students in my classroom to want to learn from me, so I work to let them know that I respect them and see them for who they are. I think it helps establish a community in my classroom that is really valuable for the kids—and it’s really valuable for me.
–Harper Gambill
Teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools
City Teaching Alliance Fellow, Cohort 2021
Baltimore, MD
