I was an accidental teacher. I don’t have an education degree. In the state of Idaho, one does not need a teaching certificate to have a classroom in a private school. My family was in a rough patch financially since my husband had been laid off and needed to retrain to enter the workforce. My degree was in Speech Language Pathology and I had just started the masters program (required along with a 36 month clinical fellowship to practice) when we received the news that my husband’s employer was eliminating his position.
Our second child was 2 months old when this happened. After dropping out of grad school and a brutal year of me drowning at a Title One school as an interim SLP, I took a job teaching second grade at a conservative elementary school. I suspected there would be a philosophical mismatch but my family needed me to bring in an income, and this position had the added benefit of free preschool tuition for our oldest child who was 4 at the time.
It was soon painfully clear that the values of this establishment were not representative of my own values, and I was expected to teach these values to the children in my class. I felt certain that if anyone discovered my political views, my job would be threatened. So this seemed like a very valid reason why I wouldn’t just be in love with my new teaching career. Well, that and the fact that I wasn’t trained to be teacher and felt in over my head. (Even though my classes were very small. I never had more than 8 students in my classes at this school.) I certainly enjoyed working with the children in my care, I just needed to be in an environment that aligned with my values and have the proper training, right?
Halfway through my second year at the school, one dark winter morning on my way to work, I heard an advertisement on the radio about a new International Baccalaureate charter school inviting families to enter their children into the lottery. I jumped on it. I reached out to the director and asked if they were allowed to hire non-certified teachers, and he responded that they could not, but if I would promise to complete the testing for the alternate route to certification before school started in the fall, he would consider an interview.
He ended up offering me the job based on my assurance I would get the testing under my belt before school started. I researched the process and obtained the materials to study for the exams. It wasn’t long before I realized the necessary content was, well, everything. It felt like I needed to know every detail about every subject taught in school, and it was an insurmountable mountain of knowledge. There was no way I would be able to cram that much content in such a short amount of time. Even studying for the GRE was easier than this!
I decided to just schedule the tests. If I failed them, I would have just enough time to squeeze in another attempt after the required delay and I’d have to pay the testing fee again, but at least I’d have a better idea of where to focus my attention—or so I thought. Come testing day, I was pretty nervous, but I’d always been a good test taker. The adrenaline rush that would come at the beginning of a high stakes test had always served me well, unlike the devastating opposite effect it has on so many.
While I was completing the multiple choice tests, I had no idea how I was doing. I took this as a bad sign. The one other time in my life where I couldn’t tell whether I was doing well (on an EMT test that was also high stakes for me at the time) I’d barely passed. Frankly, while I’m not a fan of using testing as a way to determine competency at anything, I believe this is the sign of a really poor test. Any test taker who’s not just swimming in adrenaline and cortisol because of test anxiety should have some idea of how they’re doing.
I was sweating and I felt a little sick as I left the secure testing room to obtain my results. I was shocked at how I did. Distinguished. Are you f-ing kidding me?! That was supposed to prepare me for what I faced in the classroom? What a joke!
To be continued…
Restoring Justis 