A Decade Examined - Part Three

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December 06, 2024

The first half of life is focused on making our way through the world with a healthy ego which we’ve developed. It’s about establishing a career, a home, a family and social networks as best we can. — Frances Ray

That quote is from an essay my writer friend Frances wrote last month, which prompted me to wonder, what if you can’t unload the belief that your “as best we can” in any of those life tasks wasn’t good enough?

This story, the third in my series looking back over the last decade, is about a time, rather late, when I reached for success in the career task, and fell short, and what I learned through that experience.

I come from a family of teachers. My father was a history professor, my mother an elementary school teacher. Her mother taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Arkansas. My older brother taught English at a university in South Korea for more than 30 years.

My own wage-earning work was never teaching, but from my forties on I was always doing volunteer teaching of some sort, with both children and adults. I was pretty good at it; I got positive reviews from my students and mentors. I worked hard at teaching and enjoyed it, although I never felt entirely, authentically myself in the role.

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In my late fifties I grew restless. I was working with PEP, a local nonprofit offering parenting education based on Adlerian theory. After taking my first classes in 1996, I soon completed PEP’s peer-empowering leadership training course and began teaching classes for parents of toddlers through teens. In 2006 I joined the staff part time as the class marketer, while continuing my volunteer teaching.

By early 2016 I was having an “is this all there is?” moment. I liked my job and was mostly content with my life, but those thoughts about becoming a school teacher grew more insistent. After considering some ways I might gradually ease into such a life change, I pursued the idea of going all-in—quitting my job and going back to school full time for a traditional master’s degree.

My research led me to Urban Teachers (now City Teaching Alliance), a program dedicated to preparing high quality, culturally responsive teachers “who accelerate student achievement and disrupt systems of racial and socioeconomic inequity.”

Although the marketing language was not as vivid and focused eight years ago as it is in that quote from the present website, those goals were solidly in place then, as was the present structure of the program. Student teachers commit to four years: a year of classroom residency with a full load of graduate coursework; a fully salaried teaching position in the second year and completion of a master’s degree with dual certification in elementary or secondary education and special education; and the final two years with continued individual coaching from the program’s educators. This last is a significant factor in its success in preventing teacher attrition, with more than 90 percent of its graduates still working in education.

I decided to apply, a process that turned out to be quite rigorous, consisting of three stages, each of which involved more challenging work than the previous. Essentially, Urban Teachers was asking its applicants, “How much do you really want this?” and I was asking the same question of myself.

Could I really do this? Make such a major career change, at my age (61)? What would it be like to go to graduate school with a bunch of 22-year-olds, and work for employers young enough to be my children? How could I leave my job, which was such a huge part of my identity? Could I give up my perfectionism, my attachments, my compulsion to control my environment? Could I spend all day, every day, with people? I’m an introvert, for goodness sake. Could I really do this?

Why would I give up a job that was part-time, highly flexible, had good working conditions, a job I basically liked, for a more-than-full-time job with no flexibility and who knows what kind of working conditions, that I might not like at all?

Amazingly, my application was accepted. And so began the most intensely challenging 14-month period of my life.

I was one of around 100 students in the Washington, DC, 2016 cohort, starting the clinically based program on Day 1 of summer school in the city public schools. Each of us was assigned to work with a host teacher in a classroom at an underserved school. We spent the mornings teaching, and afternoons at a university that provided space for our graduate classes and summer housing for the many of us coming from other states and countries.

I worked in a summer school classroom of rising third-graders. My first host teacher quit before the summer session even started. The second one, a very nice young man who seemed to have a lot of teaching expertise, quit after one day. I spent the rest of that week in the classroom with a substitute teacher; the following Monday another teacher came on the job, and she stayed. That first week is when I began to learn that, in order to have any chance at success with classroom management, you have to go in there on Day One with a detailed action plan that you stick to with absolutely total consistency. By Week Two (probably by Day Two) it’s too late.

I wasn’t the only one struggling. Each morning I drove to the university to pick up several fellow students who were working at the same school. We all had various impossible situations in our classrooms, which we commiserated about with each other on our way to the school and then back to the university, where we grabbed a quick lunch before our afternoon classes.

We were assigned to groups of about 25, each group taking all courses together. I was in an Early Childhood group, being trained to teach PreK through grade 3. Most of my classmates were in their twenties, some with teaching experience, others newly graduated. One guy had been in my daughter’s high school class; they knew each other by name though they hadn’t met. There were two middle-aged women besides me; I was the eldest student in the cohort by more than a decade.

Yet I felt entirely accepted, on equal terms with all of them. We were friends and comrades, all of us invested in the success of each, helping each other through the coursework, which was almost as difficult as the clinical work. We often worked in small groups, a laboratory of sorts for the collaborative skills we would be teaching children. For one course we made an “immersion excursion,” each group of three going out to explore a different section of Washington, DC, collecting information and photos of the neighborhoods, businesses, schools, historical sites, and other characteristics, which we then shared with the whole class in a PowerPoint presentation.

During that summer we also were being placed in DC schools and public charter schools for the fall. For most of us this was a simple matter; school principals were eager to have these students who would be well-trained teachers they could hire the following year.

For me, it was not so simple. Urban Teachers administrators working on my behalf finally got me a placement in the PreK 4-year-olds class of a public charter school, just in time for the week of meetings and classroom prep before the first day of school.

So began the most educational and hardest year of my life. We residents worked in our classrooms from 8:00am to 3:15pm, then attended graduate classes Monday through Thursday evenings. Of course we also had homework, projects to complete, most of which were based on our classroom teaching, which periodically was observed and graded by our teachers and coaches.

Four-year-olds come with their particular set of challenges. Most are eager to please and enjoy the lessons and classroom resources. There are always some outliers, kids who are not quite developmentally ready for the demands of school, or who have learning differences. As the student teacher, I usually worked with the low-achievers.

One of education’s favorite words is “rigorous,” the gold standard for everything—the children’s lessons, our graduate work, the physical setup of the PreK classroom. From the start, my two host teachers seemed to sense a lack of sufficient “rigor” in my work, which they worked tirelessly to correct.

Several times that fall, I was given the task of setting up the station for imaginative play, which changed every couple of weeks, from doctor’s office to post office to general store, etc. Creating the scenario and building all the scenery, props, and costumes involve a skill set that I totally lacked. Luckily, my next-door neighbor, a former preschool teacher, has impressive skills and gave me essential help to get through that fall semester.

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In January, my assignment was changed to another charter school, and a class of 21 kindergarten students.

Aaron

One of my courses that semester was Understanding and Managing Behavior, required for certification in special education because many students who are found eligible for special ed and related services have a Behavior Intervention Plan, or BIP, as part of their Individualized Education Plan, or IEP. (Education-speak is filled with acronyms.) As with nearly all of our courses, a large part of the work involved practicing on actual students.

My guinea pig was Aaron (not his real name). Before writing his BIP, I had to do a Functional Behavior Analysis (FBA). That meant gathering data on the exact nature, frequency, and environment of his disruptive behaviors, in order to determine his positive goal—which for most children is to gain attention, or avoid work, or both. The BIP includes a plan, which is made with the child’s agreement, for a substitute behavior, which is then rewarded by giving the child the positive attention he wants. I actually had a little bit of success—enough to write my report and get a decent grade—by having Aaron raise a silent hand, put the other hand over his mouth, and then wait while I called on one other child before calling on him. I might have experienced more success, and a better relationship with Aaron, had I kept this up after the course ended. I did not keep it up, mainly because I was constantly feeling overwhelmed with other course requirements and with the daily grind of managing and trying to teach 21 kindergarteners.

Roberta

Roberta (not her real name) was small for her age, often quiet and withdrawn, but tough. She had severe asthma and had spent two weeks of the fall semester in Children’s Hospital. Before every outdoor recess, she went to the school nurse for her medication, administered through an inhaler. Unlike many kids, who resist necessary medicine or use it as an excuse to get extra service from coaxing and cajoling adults, Roberta was totally responsible; she went to the nurse on her own, with no reminders.

She’d been behind in schoolwork ever since her hospitalization and was in the low reading group. But she had a quick mind and was eager to learn. She gave me my first-ever experience of knowing for sure that a student actually learned something I taught.

I had been trying to teach several kids how to use a number line for addition and subtraction. According to the “best practices” I was learning in my courses, kids need to learn math concepts (why it works), not just procedures (how to do it). In order to gain the conceptual understanding, they need to approach math problems in multiple ways, including methods they create themselves.

This was hard for me to grasp at first, but once I understood it I was totally on board. I’d been taught only one, “correct” way to solve math problems, as were my fellow grad students (those kids in their 20s), and so far I had found the same to be true of all the elementary school students I’d encountered. So now I was trying to teach my kindergarteners the number line, and they were having none of it. They were sticking to their one method for addition and subtraction within ten: counting on their fingers. However, when I taught Roberta the number line, she got it, and then she completed the problem set I gave her with every answer correct.

One Friday Roberta was having a bad day. First thing in the morning, she complained of a sore throat. That was a near-daily thing with her in the early spring, probably a result of her seasonal allergies. I sent her to the nurse, but the nurse didn’t have her sore-throat medicine. Later, shortly before recess, she was complaining again and told me that the nurse had said that she would call her mom to come pick her up if the trouble continued. I took her back to the nurse, but, when offered the opportunity to go home, Roberta shook her head no. So the nurse gave her the asthma inhaler and a cup of water, and she and I went outdoors to recess.

Usually Roberta plays with her friends, but on this day it seemed everything was going wrong. One by one, three different friends came to me complaining that Roberta was been mean to them, and finally Roberta came, crying, with the same complaint about them. There was a lot of back-and-forth, with me trying without success to get the girls to talk to each other. I was annoyed because it seemed that Roberta was just being whiny.

It was Good Friday, the last day before a long-awaited spring break week. We had to work on Good Friday, in contrast to the public schools (welcome to DC charter schools, my host teacher said), so I was feeling whiny myself. However, I had set for myself the spiritual practice to fast from complaints and to be kind for the entire day. So, having earlier gently admonished Roberta to use her big-girl voice, I just stood there with my arm around her while she cried.

After a few minutes she walked away, and next thing I knew she was running to one of those “mean” friends, saying, “Let’s play hide-and-seek.” Her total mood change happened so fast it made my head spin. I looked over at her a few minutes later, and there she was, her hands covering her eyes, happily counting.

Later that afternoon, when everyone was just passing the time till the end of the school day, I brought out a Lotto game (like Bingo) using word patterns that I’d been trying to teach my reading intervention group. Roberta, who had recently joined the group, was among three girls playing the Lotto game with me. The other two were more advanced readers, so I concentrated on Roberta.

As with the number line, it just took a few minutes of focused teaching before she got it and began decoding and reading the words on her game card. I could see in her face her joy at the success she knew she had achieved. As we were putting the game away, she said, “I love you, Ms. Gelfeld!”

In the end, I was not successful. The expected next step is that the principal of your residency school hires you as a teacher of record for the following year. I had done well in my graduate courses and my teachers liked me, but neither of the principals I worked for wanted to hire me. I thought that Urban Teachers administrators could get me a job, probably in a school desperate for teachers, so I would go where I was most needed.

As they’d done a year ago, the administrators worked hard for me, searching for and sending me leads. In the final days before the new school year started I had two interviews. For each of those positions I was one of two candidates and the other one got the job. Without a teaching position, I had to leave the program. At the end of my exit interview, the director of Urban Teachers’ DC office told me that, in the (then) ten years of the program, I was the first student they had been unable to place.

Was ageism involved? Probably. The other two middle-aged women in my cohort had dropped out during that first year. I was the only one to stay long enough to get fired.

For me, it was a soft-landing failure. That day of the exit interview was painful, certainly. But once the sting faded, I felt mostly relieved. I had learned so much about myself, as well as about education. I knew that I could teach, but that classroom teaching is not my strength. Had I been hired, I would have completed the four-year Urban Teachers commitment, doing the work as best I could, but the personal cost might have been high.

Eventually I returned to working at PEP, no longer in marketing but in another position. And that is the story of another year.