Teaching Hope: Rejuvenation

The first journal entry from the section titled Rejuvenation that spoke to me was entry 124, “Empowering Young Women”, the teacher in this entry works full time as a middle school teacher and then works with at risk young girls in a disadvantaged neighborhood so that they can have a positive female figure in their lives. As someone who was lucky enough to have wonderful female role models growing up, I understand the teacher’s need to be a role model for girls who maybe don’t. One of my favorite parts of his entry was when the teacher was explaining why she helps these young girls, “because I [the teacher] was a young girl once”, and I think this statement not only reigns true with this teacher’s mission to help young girls, but also our overall mission as teachers. We were all students once and know what kind of teachers we enjoyed and what we wished we had had from our teachers, and carrying this with us will only help us become better teachers.

The second entry that spoke to me was entry 130, “Challenging the Status Quo” and the reason I really enjoyed this one is because it showed that as a teacher, you don’t have to be stuck in the same cycle and that if you fight for what you think is right in your classroom and as a teacher then someone might listen to you. In this entry, the teacher felt like they were being treated unfairly because of their race by being shackled with strictly African American classes, and decided one year that they had had enough. It took a little bit of fight, but in the end the administrator listened to her and gave her a more diverse set of classes.