Hi world.
6 weeks ago I graduated from UC Davis. 5 weeks ago I moved out of my fellowship home in Davis to a new place in Palo Alto. 4 weeks ago I started my graduate program at Stanford. 3 weeks ago all of us STEP (Stanford Teacher Education Program) students started working alongside mentor teachers in a very diverse middle school classroom in the morning. We get to the school at 8am, stay until around 1p.m, have a 2 hour break, and then have class everyday from 3:15-6p.m in the afternoon.
Honestly, if there is anything I hope to convey in this post is how lucky I am to be in a place where I have been able to process my emotions and feel so safe, supported, and loved by so many people I’ve just met.
There are so many complicated emotions that come with transition, and I am feeling the weight of all the relationships I’ve left. There are always things you are glad you left behind and things you are sad you will never have again. In a weird way, the intense schedule has been somewhat restful for my soul.
This program has already blown me away. I feel seen and appreciated here in ways I didn’t feel before, and being surrounded by people who are as passionate as I am about teaching, equity, diversity in education has been so amazing. Here I don’t feel like I have to hold back from sharing my prior teaching experiences. All the community building week 1 left me tired but happy, excited for a new year.
I have the card all my former students signed for me on my headboard to remind me why I’m here. I can celebrate what I love about education with people and go off on rants with people about every systemic issue that frustrated me in my old job. I think about all 5 classes of my former students daily as I revisit the old middle school versions of them and me in this summer placement. As the challenges build and build, the one thing that helps me keep going is God and asking myself what I want to model for my former students in this season.
On day 2 of being back in middle school, I looked at the students and saw such innocence but could already see inequities playing out. I noticed the students who stayed quiet and other students who talked over them. The subtle comments students would make in class gave me little hints into their world, their insecurities, and their desire to be seen.
A girl, Mary, told me she wanted to be a doctor. A surgeon to be exact. She wanted to serve her community and do something outstanding. Although on the quieter side, she was on a different wavelength of maturity for her years and was very driven and optimisitc.
This brought up a lot of emotion for me. I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t expect to feel so sad after a girl told me she wanted to be a doctor, or after 2 days of working with middle school students in general. I didn’t feel that I had a reason to be sad at all.
Welcome to today’s episode of Lea trying to figure out how to transition into this new season, Stanford + middle school trauma surgery edition. 🙂
~
That used to be me, I thought on my way home for lunch. I used to want to be a doctor.
There is nothing wrong with changing paths. In fact, one of the most incredible days I had at the end of college was getting to give someone I really loved and believed in who wanted to be a doctor the stethoscope my dad gave me when I was 5.
If I wanted to endure medical school I know I could. I’d probably do much better on the MCAT because I’m a master at acid and base chemistry thanks to my 5 quarters of teaching to my boss’s insanely hard tests. I’m just after bringing a new kind of healing to this world now. One that starts with the next generation really knowing that their identity does not come from what they do, but who they are.
But having been pre-med and working with mostly pre-vet and pre-med students in my previous job, I know the hell my undergrad puts them through. It is a mental battle that all my former students and friends who are still at UC Davis are battling every single day as they fight to teach themselves material and get above the standard deviation on 50 minute midterms worth 30% of your grade. You mess up one midterm and it’s already so difficult to get an A, which most students in those categories need to get accepted. Many of these students don’t get As and spiral like crazy in feelings of imposter syndrome and unworthiness. First-gen students battle another layer of figuring everything out on their own and learning it’s okay to ask for help. There are ways to do well in the weeder classes, and I got lucky in some when Covid cut my finals and made things easier. But the midterms are so inequitable that they really don’t measure how much you know but how well you answer a specific random set of questions in a given moment. If you spent hours studying the organic chemistry mechanism that wasn’t on the test, RIP.
My first thought when Mary told me she wanted to be a doctor was, I hope she goes to a college in the future that does better for her than UC Davis.
The next thing I thought about was the last day I taught at UCD, and all the last days of the quarter when we’d make a circle and share everything we’ve learned throughout the year and cry.
The majority of students always would share about how the year or particular quarter was uniquely challenging, and the amount of mental health struggles they experienced. There was a beauty in this as we affirmed each other for not letting the system get to us, for not letting each other believe a grade is what defined us. These students had hope, and gave me hope for an emotionally healthier future generation. I was confident they would succeed, as I believed there were no real failures, that they were all beginning to walk in freedom. My goal had always been to take the pressure off of them to be perfect, for them to work hard from a sustainable place of love rather than a place of lack.
The truth is that I still look back at my life sometimes and think some things were bad because they were hard and painful, though hard is not necessarily bad and easy is not necessarily good. As I said in the last post, the research on stress shows that every measure of it predicts more meaning in life. The Bible also says there is a joy that comes with facing difficulties, and it makes me wonder why we equate struggling with not doing well to this day when struggle is what we were built for as humans.
I allowed myself to feel the weight of everything I had carried in those 4 years. I cried because I couldn’t avoid pain then and I still couldn’t now. I grieved the pain I watched my former students go through, for the ways I couldn’t take away the inequities they had to face. As resilient and capable as my former students were, I still wish I could’ve given them better. I sobbed because I knew my middle school kiddos were going through so much underneath, and I sobbed at the thought that history would repeat itself and they’d all grow up to say it was the worst time of their life like everyone else I know does. It wasn’t my burden to carry, to take away their pain. But I still wished I could.
I continued to cry because I could see the students had already decided who was smart and who wasn’t at this age. I talked about it with my friend Giselle, who drove my car since I was crying and understood full well what I was feeling. I also mentioned that day maybe it was a delayed grief reaction from graduating college 4 weeks ago. She told me that when she first graduated and started a job right after that she also cried a lot in the period of transition. It was normal. I cried because I left my 7 housemates, my entire community, and a job I loved. I cried because parts of my old identity were gone, even if my last quarter of senior year was spent with me longing for the new thing I now had.
I cried because I was tired. Being gone from 8-6p.m was amazing, but a lot. I cried because I could no longer just get coffee with someone in the morning or take a gal I mentored out for lunch.
I cried because I didn’t feel like I was doing enough in the classroom. I sat there and watched my mentor teacher teach, and made no effort to help her control the chaos. I was so scared of stepping in, of leading, of saying something that would hurt a student who really just needed to be seen. It didn’t feel natural to be there. I wasn’t empowering anyone in their worth or abilities. I didn’t know how to in this new setting. I felt so powerless and so weak.
And I cried because I didn’t expect to feel this way. I expected to fall in love with the new classroom day 1. I cried because I felt disconnected from the students, because I didn’t know how to tell a kid to stop bullying other kids, because I thought it would come more naturally to me to work with them. I wasn’t sure how to truly be in it with them the same way I used to be with my former students. And when so many of us look back at our middle school experiences, many of us think there is too much broken there to ever be fixed.
I thought I was done working through my past. I guilted myself into thinking I should be grateful to be here, that I should not be feeling this way about my dream job. I am so confused as to why I am here and have no idea how what God could have in store for me here could actually be good. But I know it is.
~
“How are you?” Polly, my supervisor asked me, as I was standing outside of the door welcoming my middle school students.
“I’m okay. I’ve been crying a lot, but I’m okay.”
“What is going on?”
“I don’t know. I’m having trouble connecting to the students. I look at them and I see their innocence and I just think about them growing up and 10 years from now still saying this was the worst time in their life like most of us do.”
She gestured for me to walk with her away from the classroom and tilted her head down to listen.
“Polly, I’m just not sure if this is actually for me,” I told her finally. Tears spilled. I told her what I was feeling. I was sad, overwhelmed, and not really sure why. It was a combination of graduating so recently and leaving my entire old life behind and not feeling like my dream job was a dream come true. I loved STEP. But the actual teaching part worried me. To see all the issues in the classroom that I can’t control all at once. To see the kids acting out and know immediately that they just want to be seen and loved. Are they going to regret this time the same way we all do when we grow up? They’re right in front of us, and what am I doing right now to actually change this fate?
“There are always people who leave every year. And there are options if you want that,” she said gently.
“Really?” I said.
“Of course. Some people just get a masters. Some people just decide halfway they can’t do it anymore and want to do something else.”
“But this is what I always wanted,” I said. I started crying even more. “I guess it’s just not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t expect it to be easy,” I said.
“This is really hard. This is an extremely hard transition,” Polly said.
“It’s not the schedule or the classes that is hard. I love them. Maybe I just miss my old job.”
“What was different about your old job?”
“Well that is the thing. When I had it, I loved it, but there were so many things that bothered me about teaching college too. I was so excited to come here and actually teach, to not measure my success as a teacher to my boss’s tests.”
She waited.
“I was able to truly be in it with them. I was an undergrad. I understood them. I knew what they needed to do well. Here I feel like I know nothing. Middle school Lea thought nobody understood what she needed. And now I’m in a middle school classroom, and I don’t get what they need. It just makes me sad,” I said.
She listened for a long time. Her solution in that moment was to hook me up with her neighbor who needed a dog walker so I’d have a regular dog that could aid my transition.
In the staff lounge, we had a crying party. Many others were going through hard things, including Polly. We cried, hugged it out, and took several really deep breaths. My friend Bear let me pet her service dog, which is a huge deal because I’m not supposed to pet her when she is on duty.
After calming down for a bit, I went back into the classroom I was working in. Their elective class was my favorite, and my CT or cooperating teacher was outstanding at teaching both physics and neuroscience. Today in neuroscience they were learning about growth mindset, something that I used to teach my own students.
The previous day they had to do an activity where they would throw a sandbag at a target several times. Then they’d put on distortion goggles, and try to throw the sandbag at the target again. The goggles would make them throw more to the right, and they would have to adjust their aim to hit the target with the goggles on.
When we would take the goggles off, now all of a sudden we were all throwing more to the right when we had to hit the target. It took several minutes to train our brains to hit the target again without correcting our aim for the distortion goggles.
“Write something you think you are naturally good at next,” she said.
Today they were reflecting on this practice. In the beginning of class they did an activity to model how neurons get faster and sending messages with practice. Then, Veronica, asked the students to write on a piece of paper how they felt when they made mistakes. They weren’t supposed to show anyone, but I caught several glimpses of what they were writing. They felt worthless, like a failure, like poop, like they weren’t good enough.
After a few minutes she said, “Now, this is going to blow your mind and it made me cry when I first learned it. Nobody is naturally good at anything. I can’t make the baby I’m about to have draw me Picasso paintings straight out of the womb. You became good at things because you practice them. There is really nothing you can’t learn.”
“But what about those times you see someone get something faster than you? When that happens that is just because their neurons are more aligned to get it than yours are because of previous experience. They might not even remember those previous experiences. Something has happened that has primed their brain to have their neurons more wired to do that thing. How good you are at something has nothing to do with being naturally good at it, but practice. And most of all, making mistakes,” she continued.
“I want you to crumple up your paper and then uncrumple it. When you uncrumple your paper, I want you to trace the lines of the crumpled paper.”
The students began to trace the lines of the crumpled paper.
“Whenever you feel like you are struggling to understand something, this is exactly what is happening in your brain. Those lines you are drawing along the crumpled edges of your paper represent the connections your brain is starting to make as you learn.”
When they were done, they were allowed to take the piece of paper with how they felt when they made mistakes on it and throw it really hard at a cardboard box. I cheered them on one by one as they tossed their old understandings of their brain. They had an understanding of neuro plasticity at 11 and 12 years old. And 21 year old Lea needed to hear it again more than ever.
~
Teaching students to be fully present, enjoying the moment, the Now in the classroom without fearing that this places the future in jeopardy: that is essential mindfulness practice for a true teacher.”
Teaching Community, bell hooks, 2003, p. 173
Because I had been so distraught, Polly told me to talk to the director, Jeff. Not only did she think me having a regular dog to walk would help, but she thought me hearing his hope and vision for teaching would get me out of my “everything I do is going to lead to my students getting depressed in college” mindset. He found me after the neuroscience class and outside of the middle school began to ask me questions about my cultural identity, my parents’ background, why I wanted to teach, and what I had been feeling lately. Apparently he remembered the essay I wrote to Stanford.
He told me story after story of specific students at the high school he founded that would’ve never seen college as an option that made it. Apparently one of them graduated in the same ceremony I did 4 weeks ago.
“And I know that. I guess I just don’t understand how all of these fun activities we are doing are going to help them later. Are they all just going to go to college and say they learned nothing in middle and high school like all my other students?” I asked him.
“Well,” he smiled. “Maybe the point is just to cultivate joy and to instill in them a love for learning.”
He must’ve really understood what I was feeling based on the context of our conversation because the next thing he said was, “Lea, it’s not your job to teach them organic chemistry right now in middle school. You can’t put that on yourself right now. Just give them a spark. You can’t look at them through the lens of whether or not they will succeed at a place like UC Davis. That’s not your job.”
“But when these students grow up and go to college they’re going to get hit by so many educational disparities and will struggle so much,” I countered.
“You can’t control that. Changes take time. We can’t overhaul systems overnight,” he said.
“We need you,” he pressed, “to teach one of the most difficult subjects for students of all time. I know you see what is needed. I know you want all of these students to succeed. Can you imagine what education would be like? If we had more teachers in science classes who cared about the bigger picture as much as you?”
He asked me if I felt like I was feeding into the system while being here or if I felt helpless to it. I said I felt helpless to it. To this he gave me a homework assignment. It was to look at the students not through a lens of how much pain they are going to experience later, but a lens of looking for the beauty inside of them and making every effort to call it out when I saw it. To this I cried more.
Immediately after I was beginning to see a difference in my interactions with the students. Either they were more open with me or I was more present, or a little bit of both.
~
In my previous teaching job, a lot of students cried. For me, it was an honor that they would cry with me. Every time a student would come to me or open up to me or even willingly (or not willingly) cry in my office hours, there was a part of me that got really excited. Not because I was happy they were sad. But because I knew that crying was often the beginning of change. Students who cried were able to recognize that there was something they’d been doing for a while that they didn’t want to do anymore, and they don’t know how to change but they are ready to. Other students who cried felt seen for the first time, which always moved me. My first thought when a student would cry was, this student is going to change the world. We need more people here like them.
As teachers, it is a gift to even share any space with our students. I cherish every text and dog picture students send me. Especially towards the end of my time at Davis, my students really surrounded me with a lot of affirmation that I needed in that time. Everything about being with them was the greatest gift of my life.
Being a student again has been an interesting reverse of roles. They answer my questions. I used to send my students really long, heartfelt and encouraging emails a few times a week. The instructors here send us encouraging emails with important key points we need to know just like I used to do. It’s super weird. All these things I just kinda thought would be fun to do on my own in my class, these people do. And they’ve been doing this forever. Getting EOP students through gen chem at UCD was my thing. Getting students through STEP is theirs. I look at my instructors and see the reciprocity of being able to receive everything I used to give. I had no idea what I was doing back then, but now it makes sense. I’ve never been more grateful for this.
I wonder what my instructors thought when they saw me crying. But I know for sure they don’t think, this one is broken. I’m past the point in my life where I feel like crying is bad, or that this much crying means there is something wrong with me. I’m not concerned, because mental health isn’t being happy all the time but being able to lean into the deep emotions and truly feel. To feel and to come back to center. To not be afraid to feel, and to regulate when needed.
When I’d come to Curriculum and Instruction class after having cried for the whole break beforehand, my prof would say, “I worry only about people who don’t feel anything at all.”
I’m at Stanford. It was here that all the research on growth mindsets evolved. We used to think struggle was a sign of incompetence, but we know it’s actually a sign that the brain is forming new connections.
If I could go back to middle school Lea crying in all of her classes, I would’ve told her the same thing. I would pick her out or the crowd of all the seemingly perfect kids. I guess I cried throughout all of high school and college as well. Every time, without fail, I became someone better with a greater capacity to give.
There is so much more to learn, and being undone here would keep me from accepting complacency and lies from ruling my life later.
This one, right here, is going to do amazing things. This is what God declares over us in our mess. Why he’d take a chance on my crying mess I will never understand.
~
I reached out to some former mentors of mine and told them about some of the issues I was seeing in the classroom. Shoutout to Kelly, Ingrid, and Dr. Velazquez for hearing out my dilemmas and for telling me my feelings in this season are normal.
I asked Ingrid, a STEM education teacher who loves working with neurodivergent kids, a question about kids who act out in the classroom. I told her that I just stare at them messing with each other and don’t know what to do, because I know most of these kids need to be seen more than they do punished but that’s all our education system ever does to them. If Lea has to choose between classroom control and putting kids in a box, she chooses to not put kids in a box. A lot of teachers disagree with me on this and that’s fine. I stand firm in my belief that it’s not my job to turn kids into someone I think they should be, but to help them find who they are.
Ingrid’s response to my question about working with neurodivergent kids was exactly what I needed to hear. She reminded me to trust my intuition, which was strong. To ask them what they wanted to do. To be sensitive to any trauma that causes them to act out, and make space for it. She said to meet them as humans first.
I told her that because I am so sensitive to this, most of them time I just stand in a corner of the classroom and do nothing because I don’t know what to do. I told her I spent the first week just crying after placement. It’s too much to make space for. It’s so much harder to make space for people to be human than to shove everyone in a box. It’s so much harder to really reach in and see kids for who they are.
“It can be overwhelming. Try to choose one thing you can do, one thing to help a kid or help your teacher. Just one,” Ingrid said. I could hear the gentleness in her voice through her text.
I get overwhelmed because I think about everything. She told me to just do one, and this helped me greatly.
When I went back to class that day everyone was eating popsicles outside to celebrate the end of the week. A swarm of kids went to look at one of my teaching buddy’s Pokémon cards. One girl, Itzel, stood outside by herself, with a giant hoodie and baggy pants. She was one of the quietest in that loud class. The other kids started chasing each other and playing. I went up to her.
“Is this a lot for you?” I asked. She nodded.
I smiled. “Me too,” I told her.
I asked her a bunch of questions about what she likes to do. She hated school and definitely didn’t want to go to college because she didn’t like taking classes. She had 2 siblings and told me about taking care of her little sibling. She also told me about her family. When I asked her what she liked to do she said she didn’t know. One thing I’ve learned in grad school is many times people say they don’t know because they don’t think their answer is right, not because they genuinely don’t have an answer.
She had an answer. She told me she liked to draw. She handed me a folded piece of graph paper with something she drew on it. I unfolded it to find a robot, made of many shapes.
“Itzel, this is amazing. This reminds me of a housemate I used to live with. Her name is Glendy. She loved doing art with shapes.” I pulled up Glendy’s Instagram and showed it to her.
“She was the first in her family to graduate from college, and now she has a job doing design and management for a nonprofit that works with homeless people in the Tenderloin.”
“You can do this you know? If your passion is what you’re telling me it is right now, to build things and draw and create robots or build anything, you can literally help so many people with this gift of yours. You can do this in college. You can be an engineer or a designer. You can literally do whatever you want. But you need to do your best in school. We need more people like you in these fields.”
Her face began to light up and for a second I thought I saw her smile. The next day when I told my CT and my partners that Itzel loved to draw and build things, they were extremely surprised. She is after all so quiet and barely touches the materials in class. I am not surprised. The quietest people always have the most to say.
~
Talking to Itzel led to leading the neuroscience class, and this led to building a relationship with Jojo.
Jojo, our most challenging student who walks out of class a lot, tries to be the bad kid, and says a lot of mean things to other students but has grown to trust my CT because we all see straight through this mask. I was so surprised when I came in to second period and Jojo said to me, “Ms. Faith, you are my favorite assistant teacher.”
“Seriously?” I replied. “Why?”
“I don’t know. You went to UC Davis, and you’re pretty cool.” I had gotten to know Jojo a lot. Underneath the outbursts and outsmarting of my CT to get what she wants, she had a sister who went to UC Davis and she genuinely wanted to find herself in college and as a person.
I literally did nothing in class however. I wasn’t sure why she liked me.
I’m realizing that it is enough for me to just be myself, but it feels like I’m trying to find my voice all over again.
You focus on doing one thing, and then all the sudden you are doing so many. I’ve been trying to run from being a leader, but then we end up with a sub for 2 days and I find myself leading far more than I anticipated. This led to stepping in more when my CT had to run outside after Jojo, to pulling a kid named Lucas out who had an outburst to see if he was okay, and finding out his mom yells at him and threatens to ship him to China if he gets bad grades. He was so caught up in perfectionism at 11 years old, with a mom who wanted her son to go to Stanford like her life depended on it.
“What you want is just as important as what your mom wants,” I told Lucas outside of class after listening to him openly talk about how his mom treats him for a long time.
The more I build relationships, the more confidence I have to confront conflict. I focus on one thing— trying to be firm but loving, and all of a sudden I’m able to control the class a little more each day and feel less and less afraid.
And today was a big gem. A kid got punched in the face today which sucked. But before that, Jojo ditched her first period class to visit mine when usually she leaves ours to go somewhere else.
“You really need to go back to your class. But I’m so delighted you wanted to come!” My CT told her. “Does this warrant a hug?”
“Ew.”
“Jojo how about this. You can hug Mrs. Heintz or take a walk with me.”
“Much better. I’ll take a walk with you.”
“Okay,” I said. Jojo followed me out.
“Jojo, you know you’re extremely smart right?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“What are you going to do with that?”
“I don’t f*ing know.”
“You know, you can f*ing change the world right?”
She looked at me with incredulous eyes that said, are you kidding me?
“Jojo, you’re a leader. All of your friends follow you around everywhere. You care about people. I know you do.” I thought of her giving candy to all her friends and constantly trying to leave class to see them.
“How do you want to lead them?” I asked her. She shrugged. We got to the class she was supposed to be in.
“We love you Jojo. Okay bye!” I said. My friend Sunshine opened the door to let her back in, and I turned around to go back.
~
I was really surprised today when my CT told me everything I was doing well and said I had grown immensely in just this week alone. I’m really thankful.
I’m trusting that God has something for me here. None of this was expected, the good or the bad. I am learning to see myself the way God sees me, and be aware of what God sees in these students. I am reminded of middle school Lea and the ways God met me in that season. And I don’t know how to teach anymore, but it’s not my job to know that. I feel the Lord teaching me, showing me the same grace and patience I’m trying to have for my students.
If you’re a teacher, you are amazing. Thank you for your patience, love, and dedication to the hardest profession of life.
I’m thankful today for the new church I go to, which has been challenging me to be present and surrender my future to the Lord. I’m thankful for my old and new communities, for believing in me and my family for helping make Stanford happen for me. I’m thankful for STEP, my teaching partners Oscar + Sunshine, my CT Veronica, and my instructors for giving me full permission to feel what I feel.
I’m thankful for the 2 hour break between placement and class, getting to walk a famous professor’s dog after class, naps, my car, and frantic prayer sessions while driving to class.
Despite many of the ups and downs, many of which I did not include here, I am so thankful to be here even if it’s not what I expected. I’m grateful to grow again, to be stretched, and to come undone in such a safe place.
I’m thankful for Stanford’s dining hall, so many new friends, and the opportunity to find who I am as a teacher. I’m grateful to be around outstanding teachers who embody the vision I carry.
I’m grateful that although I cannot change my past, I do get to choose who I get to be now. That God is still working, and isn’t done with me yet.
~Lea
lea faith 