75,000 Readers Encourage Me

My first year at Metro, I suffered from a serious "short-timer attitude". I kept thinking that while this was a really good gig, I would finish out the year and be gone.

I tried very hard to implement the curriculum exactly as it was presented to me, but mid-semester, I realized that while the content was fine, I could not follow the thinking behind someone else's schedule. I began to make changes. In December the professor retired, and I became THE only professor teaching that class. By my second semester, I knew the content and totally changed the schedule. I was asked to attend a conference on Learning and the Brain. My interest in reading research grew as I read sample textbooks and all the professional resources I had inherited. I continued to reconcile what I knew about how children learn to read with the accountability requirements my students were expereincing in their field placements.

The second semester, another reading professor announced her retirement in June. I was encouraged to apply for my same position again. I figured if they found a reading professor that met their criteria, I'd just become an adjunct. Not to happen. Full-time again in the fall, I now was the lead teacher in both of the reading classes. Noone in had ever taught both, and I took the opportunity to coordinate the curriculums. After all, students only took 6 hours of reading. I wanted it to count. I coordinated meeetings between all of the adjuncts and we did some cross-analysis and adjustments. As you can see, I was slowly getting sucked into the challenges here.

My second year, three things happened. I seriously bonded with my students. I was advising, which brought me to a very personal level, and I appreciated the challenges many of these urban students were facing just to be pursuing a college degree. I began having students from the first class taking the second class with me. I found myself wanting more than ever to be the most effective teacher possible.

My personal children's book library was growing again (I had given away all but the most special books)and I shared my favorites--new and old--with my students. How could they not know Don and Audrey Woods? Cris Van Alsburg? Mem Fox? I began to read and bring new authors, like Rick Riordan with The Lightening Thief. I began to value what I could do to change the attitudes about teaching reading that I was seeing students exhibit when they came into my class. Many were dreading, seriously dreading, roung-robin reading and workbook pages.

Then one day, I had a student in class comment on how I was really passionate about teaching reading. Well, I replied, what we do in this class is critical. I turned to the board and began to write figures. There are generally 25 students in an elementary classroom. A 30-year career can be figured as the norm for teachers. So over that 30 years, a teacher could plan to have around 750 students. There were 25students in this college classroom. So, what we did in this college classroom had the potential to impact (I had to quit talking here while I did the math) 18,750 students. I asked students to picture all of them standing outside the window, and to promise them to do everything possible to support them in learning to read and loving to read. Yes, I was passionate about books and reading, always had been and always will be.

Later that day, I thought about the four classes I was teaching. At that rate, what I did had the potential to impact 75,000 readers every semester. I was hooked big time, determined again to make a difference for as many years as I could. Soon after that, I made a visit to UNC, and when I reapplied for my position again, I was offered full-time with a reduced class load (three classes) for five years IF I were to pursue a doctorate. Sounded good to me. So much for short-timer!