In the beginning...

...I was like all (most) new teachers - excited and eager to begin my work. While student teaching in Boston in the late 1990s, I decided two things - one: that I would go home to teach, and two: that I would teach in an urban (read: needy) school. My mother was a city teacher all her life. She warned me about incompetent administrators and bureaucracy, but I was sure these things existed all over, and I was certainly sure (ye old vanity of youth) that I could handle that - it was the kids who really needed me after all... Ah, the kids - my first year (mis-assigned, as there was a special education shortage, and my education along with some TA experience clearly qualified me to run my own self-contained 6th grade special ed. class) was a crazy series of ups and downs. The principal who hired me and seemed so caring left in October to take a job with the higher-ups, training other principals (I wonder if he told them it was appropriate to leave a school in the lurch).

The AP who took over visited me during evening parent-teacher conferences (which were mostly vacant) and asked a little about my background. Upon hearing the name of the swank suburban district I had been employed by the year before, he did a visible double-take and asked with great dramatic emphasis, "What made you come here?" Now if that isn't an auspicious beginning, I don't know what is... And so my years began...