During my first year of teaching, there was a baby who was always in one student’s Zoom background. He’d bang on the fish tank, scribble on a whiteboard, and eventually, their father carried him off-camera so my student could focus.
Five years later, that baby—Anthony—is now a student in my class. He bangs with a toy hammer in the dramatic play center, carefully writes out sight words, and sits front and center on the rug, eager and ready to learn.
I started my career from my apartment in Oakland, Calif., in the fall of 2020 teaching 4-year-olds in my transitional kindergarten class. COVID-19 closed down public schools in my state for almost a year, but despite the challenges and strangeness of remote learning, I fell in love with teaching.
I watched Anthony grow from a baby to an almost-kindergartner—and I watched myself grow, too. I went from a bumbling, nervous novice to a more confident, more seasoned “veteran,” as my principal jokingly calls me. But with nearly half of all new teachers leaving within the first five years, I’ve earned the moniker. Making it to my fifth year was no small feat, especially given what it’s been like to teach since 2020. Teachers at all stages appear to be leaving the profession at higher rates since before the pandemic.
When I first started teaching, I felt a sense of solidarity with other teachers as we all embarked on the remote-learning adventure together. I grew close to families who I texted and called daily until it became second nature and I got to sing, dance, and laugh with my students who were just happy to see me and their classmates each morning.
But when we all returned to the classroom, the pandemic had changed us. My fellow teachers and I observed that students had shorter attention spans and found it harder to focus during lessons. They were emotionally volatile, bursting into tears and having more conflict with their peers. And they were missing days and weeks of school, many of them citing depression and anxiety.
Parents were struggling, too. They were more stressed out, experiencing higher rates of food insecurity, houselessness, and neighborhood and domestic violence. And beyond my own school, school closures from declining enrollment paired with strikes over teacher pay and class sizes led to more chaos and instability in my city and others.
The last five years in education have been hard. Exacerbating these challenges has been a public discourse filled with daily declarations on all that is wrong with education—often with good reason. The front pages and political stages have been full of poor reading scores, troubling trends in student mental health, and continued learning loss.
But as all of this has gone on, I remained committed to teaching. I owe this commitment in no small part to the resilience I have seen from students, families, and other educators who inspired me to keep going on my hardest days. I think of my student who learned to speak and then read in English months after arriving in the United States. I think of the father of one of my students, who cried sharing how he wanted his son to have a kinder upbringing than his own. I think of my mentor who, decades into her career, would still stay for hours after school to work with students to practice what they hadn’t yet mastered in class.
They all made me better. Over the past five years, I’ve improved at my craft, finding ways to use Play-Doh, twigs, and shaving cream to teach kids their letters. I’ve turned our classroom into an art gallery where students showcased their photography, sculptures, and portraiture. I’ve figured out the language to speak to students about complicated and sensitive situations occurring in their lives, including missing incarcerated parents or grieving teachers lost from our community.
I became a better, more committed teacher, reflecting back the good I saw in my community and excited to see more to come.
This is often what is missing when we talk about schools: In the face of all the tumult, so much good work carries on.
This aftermath of the pandemic is an inflection point for education. At a time when educators have been asked to change because so much is not working, we have an opportunity to change things for the better.
When we ask a question like “how big should a school be?,” we are implicitly asking, “what do we want schools to look and feel like?” When we consider “how much should teachers be paid?,” we are also considering “how do we attract and keep impactful educators around for all of our students?”
And it is in the tense school board meetings and drawn-out teacher strikes that the work of reimagining education can take place. It is exciting to be a part of that reimagining, which I see whenever I attend meetings with educators, nonprofit leaders, and policymakers to plan the future of early-childhood education in our city or meet families at the beginning of every school year to enlist them as field trip chaperones, read-aloud volunteers, or classroom guest speakers.
In my first five years of teaching, I have seen public education become front-page news all over the world. Everyone has an opinion about what happens in schools. People are looking to see what comes next. I’m looking forward to shaping what the future will look like.
As the school year comes to a close, Anthony’s mom and I are having a hard time saying goodbye. Instead, we talk about the past school year—about how far Anthony has come from running around the classroom and causing chaos to paging through books from our class library and inviting his friends to join.
Anthony is ecstatic about the future. He can’t wait to go to the big school, meet his new teacher, have more kids to play with, and keep on growing at his favorite place in the world—school.
If he’s ready for change, I’m ready, too. Five years down, and many more to come.
