My Biggest Accomplishment as a Teacher

“Are you going to be my teacher next year?”
“No,” I responded.
“Why?” The student asked.

My student, John, showed up to class every day in the 2020–2021 school year. As a ninth-grade student, he participated often and grew from a Kindergarten reading level to a sixth-grade level in reading within a 10-month span. He and his mother thanked me for all my work helping him as one of the most formative teachers in his education, and he wanted me to be his teacher the next school year as well.

However, the year before, I didn’t know if I could continue teaching. As a new college graduate in a high-poverty, inner-city school district in Baltimore, a city victim to centuries of systemic racism and disinvestment, I left every day of my first year teaching feeling like the worst teacher in the world. A few weeks before the school year started, the content area I was supposed to teach suddenly switched from high school English to middle school special education.

As a middle school teacher teaching students with moderate to severe disabilities in the most restrictive setting, I failed to manage the class. it seemed like every other day I had to call a hall monitor to help break up an altercation between my students. I felt like an underqualified and incompetent failure at the basic job of keeping my students safe, let alone teaching them.

The only thing that interrupted the dumpster fire of my first year of teaching was the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, everything closed down. A global pandemic uprooted everyone’s lives, especially those of my students.

The next school year, the entire year of education for most students in Baltimore City happened through virtual learning. On Zoom, I often taught my three classes during the day to students with no cameras on, and microphones muted. Sometimes, I heard the familiar sound of an Xbox turning on, and sometimes, when I called the name of some students or chatted them on Zoom to confirm at their computers, I would receive no response.

Over the course of the year, I learned not to talk at my students, but talk with them. Instead of being hyper-focused on delivering the curriculum and delivering all the material or making sure to read through the whole book. Instead of talking for minutes at a time, I would ask simple questions like “Jane, what do you think?” and “Josh, what do you notice about this picture on page 51?” While delivering all accommodations and modifications for my students, I allowed my students to lead the classroom instead of trying to just lecture at them.

I didn’t become a perfect teacher. I would say I became just an average or maybe above-average teacher. But John showed up on Zoom every day. His camera was off, and he didn’t say a word. But he would communicate with me in the chat and private message me his answers to check for understanding questions on Zoom.

As the year wore on, he grew a lot more comfortable. I administered beginning-of-the-year assessments, and John was one of my academically lowest students. He was in the ninth grade, and he was reading at the Kindergarten level. He was dyslexic, but he worked extremely hard every day to take advantage of tools he had through virtual learning. In particular, he used text-to-speech tools he found through Google Chrome to read text to him. He also used a speech-to-text tool to write entire five-paragraph essays, which he would later use spell-check tools to edit.

I knew John was defined by a lot more than one test score, but he grew into my most engaged student. He almost never unmuted himself to participate. Sometimes, of six or seven questions I assigned, John completed maybe three or four. He never read out loud, but he regularly answered questions for adaptive reading comprehension activities that gave him readings and questions at his grade level.

Over the course of the school year, I noticed something: the questions and readings were getting a lot harder. As he kept performing well at these activities, I gave incentives of occasional PlayStation gift cards. He complained to me about the readings getting more difficult, and I told him it was actually a good thing — it meant he was getting a lot better at reading.

At the end of the year, John tested on the sixth-grade level in reading. He wasn’t yet on grade level, but I was elated he made a six-year jump in his reading level. At the end of the year, I asked John’s class one thing they’d improved at over the course of the school year.

“Reading,” John posted in the chat.

John asked me one day if I would be his teacher the next year. I told him I would not — I would be teaching ninth grade again. He would be going on to the tenth grade.

The irony of writing an essay on a major accomplishment of my student is that I feel like I had nothing to do with that accomplishment.

As a teacher, it’s improper to take excessive credit for a student’s success. The student is the one who was successful and put in the work to be successful. But when I think about my proudest moment or story as a teacher, it’s one without any sexy Hollywood moments. It’s about a student who simply showed up every day, tried his best, and used his tech-savviness to use the tools available to him.

John taught me the importance of consistency, doing your best, and a growth mindset in tackling things you think you’re not good at. John is currently in the 11th grade, and I follow up on his education, particularly on how he’s doing in English class. At the end of the year, he had an IEP meeting where he was moved outside the more restrictive setting of self-contained to a general education setting with his peers outside the general education setting.

At first, he struggled. We came back from virtual learning and his English teacher told me he was not doing well with text-dependent questions on worksheets, but he tried his best. At the end of his first quarter, the teacher asked the class to write an essay about the book they were reading.

“An essay? I know how to do this,” he told his teacher.

He aced the essay, and he would end up being immensely successful, with A’s and B’s in his English classes and improving even more in his reading.

Teaching John shaped me into who I am today, as an educator, person, and future attorney. I learned of my strengths in empowering people and getting them to believe in themselves, as the facilitator in someone else’s story instead of the hero of my own. As someone who still works in the school system, empowering John taught me who I wanted to be to all students — someone who works with people instead of talking at them and constantly telling them what to do. It’s who I hope to be with my clients, who I hope to be with my spouse and future kids.

There were no breakthrough moments where John’s life completely changed after reading a book he loved. But the year did reframe how he thought of himself as a reader. Facilitating that process is my greatest accomplishment as an educator.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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