I grew up in a suburb of Richmond, Virginia. I attended this high school, and my best friend attended this high school, so I grew up with a pretty concrete awareness of public education inequities and the unearned privilege that comes with growing up in a “good” school catchment zone.
After high school, I chose to attend Haverford College, located in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I went in with the intention of majoring in chemistry, math, or physics, since these were my favorite subjects in high school. I breezed through Haverford’s placement tests for these subjects, which only further solidified my understanding of how lucky I was to attend the high school I attended, and how unattainable these majors would have been had I had happened to live in the same school catchment zone as my best friend.
I ended up choosing to major in chemistry. The majority of my chemistry peers were planning to get an MD or a chemistry PhD after college, so I was vaguely considering those things as well. We were also recruited hard by local Big Pharma companies. (Did you know Bristol Meyers Squibb offers on-site dry cleaning?) I never really considered becoming a high school teacher, mostly because I didn’t know anyone in college who was, and it just never came up in my discussions with chemistry professors about different post-college pathways. I once attended a talk at an American Chemical Society conference about research that showed that women considering dropping out of chemistry PhD programs are actually more encouraged to finish than their male counterparts. Even though I wasn’t in a PhD program, I definitely benefited from, and internalized, this type of encouragement during my high school and undergraduate years. As a woman, I had the opportunity to be a part of the reversal of problematic gender trends in STEM fields. Sure, women are maybe a bit underrepresented in the field of high school STEM teaching, but no where near to the extent that they are underrepresented in STEM academia and STEM industries. So, needless to say, high school teaching was just not on my radar.
After college, I tested out a few different career fields. I worked in the chemistry lab of an art museum’s conservation department in Massachusetts, and I worked at a nonprofit that organized service-learning experiences for high schoolers in Chicago. Then, at the age of 25, after lots of internal deliberation, I decided that neither of these career paths were for me, and instead I wanted to be a chemistry teacher. I had come to realize that books, articles, and discussions about public education and education inequities riveted me, engrossed me, and enraged me in a way that nothing else did, which is why the career fields I was trying out were feeling a bit lackluster, and sometimes downright pointless.
I started my teacher career through Teach For America in rural Arkansas. After that, knowing that teaching was going to be my career and having realized that a master’s degree would always secure a higher salary, I moved to Philadelphia and did the “traditional” grad school route at the University of Pennsylvania, which included student teaching in Philadelphia and graduate coursework that focused on urban education. Having completed both a non-traditional and traditional pathway to teaching, I can say I have a lot of criticisms of both of these routes.
Now 15 years into my teaching career, I have worked at all types of schools – rural public, suburban public, urban public charter, and urban public comprehensive. I love teaching, and my 25-year-old self realizing that teaching was the career for me is one of the best things that every happened to me. I’m going to be a classroom teacher until I retire. While the tone of my blog posts is often critical, it is not because I don’t love teaching. There are just a lot of things about K-12 public education in the US that need to change ASAP, and I want to use the little blogging time I have to focus on those things.
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