New Teacher Diaries

A shoebox of success stories

Jun 5, 2008 5:36 PM

By MS. H

Pen poised over desk, I finally touched the tip to paper and started my response. The final question on my second-year New York City Teaching Fellows survey had lingered around the corners of my consciousness for the entire week:

“What has been your biggest success over the past two years?”

As a second-year high school special education teacher on the Lower East Side, the past two years have been filled with challenges and successes, laughs and tears, chalk and tape, quadratic formulas and character analysis, frustrations and fruitfulness. Now, I faced the task of putting all this into a three-sentence response. Encapsulating the past two years into a single incident seemed impossible.

The question ignited a week-long self-reflection. What was my biggest success over the past two years? I had not single-handedly narrowed the achievement gap. I had not derived a solution to curb New York City’s dropout rate.

Pen touched paper:

“My successes are a collection of stories,” I wrote. “My success was when Tevon, a student with severe dyslexia who was afraid to share classwork on account of his stutter and dyslexia, stood in front of the entire 9th grade at a poetry slam event and delivered a spoken-word poem to a standing ovation. On the way back to his seat, he leaned in and whispered, ‘That was for you, Ms. H.’ That is my success. There was the day Devan passed his Regents and almost knocked the breath out of me, hugging me when the results came back. That is my success. The week Alyssa brought a pencil to every class every period for a week and we ate greasy pizza in the park to celebrate. That is my success.”

My New York City Teaching Fellows mentor smiled as she read my response. “You’ve come a long way these past two years,” she said. “You’ve brought these kids a long way these past two years.”

“Thank you,” I said, looking out my classroom window as the kids shuffled to first period, waving into my classroom as they passed. As each one passed, a story came to mind, a little success that I associated with each one.

There is a common theme in all my success stories: I shared them with my students.

As this school year comes to a close, I’ve started collecting these success stories, one by one, on index cards. I am accumulating a shoebox full of them. Not only is it a great scrapbook of my first two years of teaching, it is a toolbox for the years to come. I’ll use these cards to encourage me on an especially rough day, to reflect on my first years of teaching, to hearten and inspire me throughout the rest of my career.

I am making two copies of each card. I’m going to hand out the second copy to each of my students on the last day of school. I hope that these little anecdotes will help them to continue to realize the good in themselves and encourage, inspire and propel them forward.

Ms. H is the pseudonym for a second-year special education high school teacher in Manhattan. A version of this post first appeared in the UFT blog, edwize.org, where “New Teacher Diaries” is a regular feature.