Why I'm a teacher

I feel like my life revolves around teaching and my students right now but I haven't really been posting about it. The first few months were so hard and I regularly cried in my car (everyone is so horrified when I say this but my friends who are teachers usually reply with "Yuppppp that's pretty accurate), so I guess that's why I didn't rush to post it on my blog. But my hope for this blog is to share both the good and also challenging parts about teaching and my life in general. 

Sometimes I am overwhelmed with the importance of teaching and there are some days when I feel good about it and some days where I feel like I can barely keep up / I feel like I'm barely keeping my head above water / I go and cry in my car. I teach English Language Learners and most of my students speak Spanish, Arabic, and Portuguese (although there are a few more languages sprinkled in here). I take different groups of kindergarteners through fourth graders and I see them for either 45 minutes and day or 1.5 hours a day (on some days this seems like a loooooooong time). 

I can easily say that this job is the most challenging and rewarding thing I've ever done in my entire life (I know I can be dramatic but this is the TRUTH). 

“Ms. Wernig, are you going to stay here for a long time?” I smile and respond, “For a long time? Probably!” They have seen their previous ESL teachers come and go. Some have been transferred to other schools or have left for other districts. In the past few years, they often stay for only a year or a few months because of maternity leave. When my students ask me, “Will you stay with us?” it breaks my heart because I know they don’t have many adults that stay for long in their lives. Coming from different countries and often broken homes, my students tell me they left Brazil with their mother to flee their father. My second grader tells me that he lives with his grandmother while his parents are still in Guatemala. My first grader tells me that she is excited to have dinner with her mother this one night of the week, but when I ask about it the next day, she sighs and says it didn’t happen.

When I consider how I’ll make a difference in the lives of my students, I immediately think about how I will give them the tools to communicate during their lives here. I think about how words – spoken and written – are some of the most powerful tools that we have in this world. As a lover of literature and writing, I can’t wait to teach them new vocabulary and read them stories. 

But when I walked into my first classroom for student teaching, I didn’t realize that my students from uprooted families and broken homes would need so much more from me than a few good stories and vocabulary tests. I was prepared so well my great professors and mentors, but I wasn’t ready for my students’ absolute reliance on me to show up for them every single day. When I’m out sick for a day, I can expect their outrage when I show up the next day: “You didn’t come get me yesterday! Where were you?” They cross their little arms and pretend to be offended until I assure them that I really just had a cold and I’m back for good. I am reminded of how much trust they put in me as their teacher and sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the amount of trust and dependence they have in me. 

I want to make a difference in the lives of these students by being the kind of person that my students need most: someone who can show up every day and love them while giving them the words they need to be communicate and be strong in this world. Even if I never know the influence that I have on my students, I can hope to have this impact on them during my time as their teacher.