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Considered pursuing a career in teaching? This interview will take you through the ups and downs of a first year teacher in a small private school. This is a true career story as told to Latpro and is one of many interviews with individuals in the teaching profession which among others include a Spanish Teacher, a High School Department Chair, and everything in between.

My first year teaching was amazing and exhausting. I had continued straight from my BA into a Master of Arts in Teaching program, and so hit the market as a twenty two year old. The pastor of my church introduced me to a friend of his, the headmaster of a small private school. I had been through three interviews so far with no offers, and I was getting nervous. This headmaster asked me if I wanted to work for him right there, and I said yes. I knew almost nothing about the job.

My degree was in teaching high school English. At the staff training week before school began, I learned that although the school had over five hundred students, only fourteen were high school age. I was the high school teacher. The only high school teacher. The headmaster quickly assured me he would be teaching a science class. That just left everything else, including Algebra. Only ignorance saved me from panic.

My own background included a boarding preparatory school and a college listed “Highly Selective” by Peterson’s. This little school had been cobbled together by a group of churches who wanted an alternative to the crowded and dangerous public school system, which had been in the news for being the very worst in the country. Classes were held in a church building, and teachers filled their own cars with students who had no other transportation. On the most recent set of standardized tests the high school students scored anywhere from the second to the tenth grade level. Three girls were ready to begin Algebra, while other students struggled with subtraction and multiplication.

The school had purchased a curriculum that taught all subjects with a series of workbooks. The first week of school I asked the headmaster if we couldn’t get something besides the workbooks, and learned that the budget barely covered what we already had. As I was leaving he remembered that a donation this year did give each teacher three dollars a week to spend on anything they wanted. This detail, more than anything else, brought home to me what I was facing.

Then, I hit the jackpot. An old city high school was slated for demolition, and we were given permission to go through the building just before the wrecking crew. Everything of value had been removed we were told, but we could take anything we found. I broke off from the others, who thought they might find some usable furniture among the broken and overturned desks, and began searching closets. Empty, empty, full of trash, empty. Then, the closet somebody forgot. The shelves, stacked with copies of To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and Romeo and Juliet, seemed to be waiting just for me. On the way out, our school van packed to bursting, I saw a flash of color through a half open door. Abandoned in a little office was the final treasure.

Monday morning my kids walked into our room, a changed world. In the past, long tables placed students with their faces to the walls, so that they wouldn’t distract each other while filling out their workbooks. Now, an oriental carpet graced the center of our space, and their desks circled it, facing each other. I handed each of them a fat novel, and they looked doubtful. “We’re going to read this together,” I said. “You’re going to like it.” I raised an eyebrow. “It’s about a rape trial.”

I read To Kill a Mockingbird out loud from cover to cover. The kids followed along in their copies. If I hadn’t believed in the power of literature to transform before, I would have after that year.

At Christmastime, I remembered my three dollars a week. The headmaster gave me all of it, in cash. I bought my class a Christmas tree.