What Teaching Is Actually Like

What time does your day start?

My alarm goes off at 5:40. I'm in my car by 6:25 and at school by 6:50. Contract hours start at 7:45 but I've never once walked in at 7:45. I don't think any teacher I know has. You come in early because if you don't prep before the kids arrive, you're improvising by third period. And I don't mean prep like "glance at my lesson plan." I mean I'm cutting out fraction strips, loading a Nearpod onto the Chromebook cart, checking that the Chromebook cart actually has 28 charged Chromebooks because last Thursday it had 24 because Mrs. Pagliarulo's class used them sixth period and four came back dead.

Students arrive at 8:15. By 8:15 I need the morning message on the board, the math warm-up printed, the reading groups sorted because I pulled two kids out of Group B yesterday and moved them to Group C based on their running records, and I need to have already checked my email because our assistant principal, Linda, sends scheduling changes at 6 AM and if I miss one I'll find out when a kid says "aren't we supposed to go to the library?" and I'll be standing there not knowing.

Walk us through a recent day. A specific one.

OK. Last Tuesday. I'll try to keep it to the interesting parts but honestly there's a lot that happens between 8:15 and 3:30 that just, it blurs together.

Morning meeting went fine. We do a greeting, a share, an activity. I've been doing morning meeting for 14 years and it's still the best seven minutes of my day because the kids are calm and present and nobody has had a conflict yet. Then math. We're on fractions, which is the unit where you find out which kids have a conceptual understanding of parts and wholes and which kids have been getting by on memorizing procedures. I had 26 kids in the room. Of those 26, maybe 8 really understand that three-fourths means three out of four equal parts. The rest can shade in a fraction bar but if I ask them to put three-fourths on a number line, they freeze.

I was working with a small group at the kidney table. That's the little half-moon table at the back. Four kids, all struggling with equivalent fractions. I had fraction tiles out. One of the kids, a boy named Amir, he picked up the one-half tile and the two one-fourth tiles and just held them next to each other and said "oh. It's the same size." And I thought, yes. That's it. That's the moment I've been setting up for three days. He got it because he could hold it. Not because I told him. Some version of that moment is why I still do this job.

While I was at the kidney table, the rest of the class was doing independent practice on their Chromebooks through an IXL module. Supposedly. What was actually happening was that two girls in the back were on a Google Doc writing a story about horses, a boy named Jaden had figured out how to minimize the IXL tab and was watching NBA highlights, and my most responsible student, a girl named Priyanka, was going around telling other kids to get back on task, which, helpful but also not her job. I caught all of this when I looked up after Amir's breakthrough. That's the trade-off. The small group got my full attention, but the rest of the class operated unsupervised for 15 minutes. With 26 kids and one teacher, somebody is always unsupervised. You're just choosing who.

What happened after math?

Literacy block. That's 90 minutes, which sounds like a lot, but it goes: 15 minutes whole-group mini-lesson, 20 minutes guided reading with one group while the rest does centers, rotate, 20 more minutes with the next group, then 15 minutes of independent reading, then 10 minutes for the writing journal response, and somehow you're supposed to also do a word study component but I haven't fit word study in since October. It just doesn't fit. There aren't enough minutes. My colleague Karen, she teaches next door, she does word study during snack time. I don't have a snack time built into my schedule because our specials rotation changed in November and I lost those 10 minutes.

During guided reading, I was with my lowest group. Three kids, all reading at about a second-grade level. One of them, a girl named Maya R. (I have two Mayas, so we do first name plus last initial), she's reading a passage about the water cycle and she gets stuck on "evaporation." She tries to sound it out. Ee-vap-or-ay-shun. She gets it on the third try and looks at me and I give her the nod, and she keeps going. That moment took about twelve seconds. In those twelve seconds, the other 25 kids existed without me. Nothing went wrong. But the mental load of knowing that 25 kids are operating independently while you're focused on one child's pronunciation of a single word, that's the thing about elementary teaching that nobody prepares you for. You're always partially somewhere else.

You mentioned Linda, the assistant principal. What's your relationship with admin like?

Linda is fine. She's supportive in the ways that matter, like she'll back me up with a parent if there's a disagreement about a grade or a behavior consequence. Our principal, Dr. Matsuda, I've worked under four principals in 14 years at this school and he's the best one. He doesn't micromanage curriculum. He trusts his teachers. But he's also dealing with board mandates, and the board mandates are where it gets frustrating. Last year the district adopted a new math curriculum. We had two days of training in August. Two days to learn an entirely new program, new materials, new pacing guide, new assessment structure. The curriculum is fine, actually. I don't hate it. But two days of training for a year-long implementation is, I mean. That's not enough. We all knew it wasn't enough. And then in October, the district sent an "implementation survey" asking how it was going, and everybody said "we need more training" and the district said "noted, we'll address that in summer PD." So we winged it for the rest of the year.

That's the pattern with district initiatives. They announce something in spring, train you for two days in August, and then check in eight months later when you've already adapted or given up. Dr. Matsuda knows this. He'll say things like "do what works for your kids" behind closed doors, which is his way of telling us to use our judgment even when the mandate says otherwise. I appreciate that. Not every principal does that.

What's your planning period like?

I get 45 minutes a day while my kids are at specials. Monday is art, Tuesday is PE, Wednesday is music, Thursday is PE again, Friday is library. In theory, those 45 minutes are for lesson planning. In practice, last Tuesday I spent my planning period responding to three parent emails, making copies for the next day, eating a granola bar over my keyboard, and attending a 20-minute data meeting with our instructional coach, Tamika, about benchmark assessment results. By the time I got back to my room, I had 8 minutes left before the kids came back from PE. I did not plan a single lesson during my planning period.

Lesson planning happens at home. On Sunday nights. For about two hours. My husband Geoff has learned that Sunday from 7 to 9 PM is when I'm at the dining room table with my laptop and my planner and my coffee, and he doesn't ask me questions during that time. That's not a formal arrangement. He just figured it out after about four years of marriage. The planning is the invisible part. Parents see the lesson. They don't see the two hours on Sunday that made the lesson possible.

What's yours?

How much of teaching is managing feelings that have nothing to do with school. I had a student last year, a boy I'll call Elijah, who came to school every Monday either wired or shut down. Mondays were hard for him because weekends at his dad's house were unpredictable. I knew this because his mom told me at conferences. And every Monday morning I'd watch Elijah walk in and I'd do a quick read. If he made eye contact and said good morning, we were OK. If he came in with his hood up and went straight to his desk without talking to anyone, I knew I had about 90 minutes before something happened.

And the something was always small. A pencil that broke. A kid who bumped his chair. Nothing that would bother most 9-year-olds. But for Elijah, on a Monday, a broken pencil was the last thing he could hold. He'd put his head down. Sometimes he'd cry. Once he threw his folder across the room. And in that moment, I'm a teacher and a counselor and a de-escalation specialist and a mandated reporter and I'm also still responsible for the other 25 kids who are watching and deciding what to do with their own feelings about what just happened.

I'd walk Elijah to the hallway. I'd kneel down. I'd say something quiet. Then I'd walk back in and redirect the class like nothing happened. "OK, where were we? Page 47." The skill isn't the redirect. The skill is doing the redirect while your own heart is still racing because a 9-year-old just showed you a window into a home life you can't fix. And you move on because there are 25 other kids who need you to move on. And then at 3:30, you sit in your empty classroom and you think about Elijah and you wonder if you did enough. And you didn't. You never did enough. There's always more you could've done if you had more time or fewer kids or a counselor who wasn't shared between three buildings. That's the part. The gap between what kids need and what one person in a room can actually provide.

You were a lab tech before teaching. Why'd you switch?

I was at a pharmaceutical company in Research Triangle Park for six years. Merck, contract position, doing assay development. The work was fine. I was running HPLC instruments, processing samples, writing up results. Very routine. I had a manager named Dr. Sharma who was brilliant but I saw her maybe 20 minutes a week because she was in meetings the rest of the time. The lab was quiet. Too quiet, honestly. I'd run a batch of samples, wait 40 minutes for the instrument cycle, run another batch. Some days I'd speak maybe 200 words to another human.

I coached youth basketball on the side. I coached a rec league team at the YMCA in Durham, kids aged 11 to 13. And I realized the coaching days were the days I went home feeling like I'd done something. Not because the lab work was meaningless, it wasn't, but because in the lab I was generating data points for a project I'd never see the end of. On the basketball court I could watch a kid figure out a pick-and-roll in real time. The feedback loop was immediate. That's what pulled me. I wanted the immediate loop.

I went back and got my teaching license through a career-switcher program at VCU. Took about 14 months. Started teaching at 30. Which, in teacher years, is a late start. Most of my colleagues had been teaching since 22 or 23. I showed up knowing chemistry really well and knowing almost nothing about classroom management. That first year was brutal.

Tell me about a recent day that shows what high school teaching actually looks like.

Last Wednesday. I teach five periods. Three sections of regular Chemistry and two sections of AP Chem. The regular classes have about 30 kids each. The AP classes are smaller, about 18 each. That's 126 students total, which means 126 humans with names and grades and situations and reasons why they were or weren't paying attention on any given Wednesday.

First period, regular Chem. We're doing stoichiometry, which is where students learn to predict how much product you'll get from a chemical reaction based on the amounts of reactants. It's the unit that separates kids who are comfortable with math from kids who aren't, because stoichiometry is basically a multi-step word problem with chemistry vocabulary wrapped around it. I had the lesson planned. Warm-up problem on the board, worked example, then practice problems in pairs.

About 10 minutes in, a student named DeShawn raised his hand and said "Mr. Aldridge, I don't understand what we're converting to or from." And I had this moment of, OK. DeShawn is telling me that the conceptual foundation I laid last week didn't stick. I can either push forward with the lesson and hope it clicks during practice, or I can stop and re-teach the concept of mole ratios to the whole class, which means my pacing guide is now a day behind.

I stopped. I went to the whiteboard and I drew a recipe analogy. You need 2 eggs for 1 cake. If you have 6 eggs, how many cakes? Every kid gets that. Then I said, in chemistry, the "recipe" is the balanced equation. The "eggs" and "cake" are the reactants and products. The "2 eggs per cake" is the mole ratio. DeShawn said "Oh. So the equation tells you the recipe." And I said yes. Exactly. That detour took 12 minutes. My pacing guide says stoichiometry takes four days. I'm now on day five. But DeShawn gets mole ratios now, and if I'd pushed past him, he'd have been lost for the rest of the unit.

What about AP Chem? Is that a different job?

Completely different. The AP kids are self-motivated, mostly. They're there because they chose to be, which changes everything. In regular Chem, I spend maybe 30% of my energy on content delivery and 70% on engagement, motivation, and behavior. In AP, it's flipped. I spend 80% on content because the material is genuinely hard and 20% on everything else.

AP Chem covers about two semesters of college chemistry in one school year. The exam is in May and there's a very specific set of topics that will be on it. My AP kids know this. They're anxious about it. I have a student named Grace (different Grace than the one in the math department, we have three Graces at this school), and she comes to tutoring every Thursday before school. She sits at the front lab bench with her notebook and asks questions like "on the 2024 free response question 3, why is the entropy change negative for this reaction?" She's not asking because she's confused. She's asking because she wants to be right on a level that goes beyond the rubric. That's the AP kid. They want to understand the why behind the how.

The hard part of AP Chem isn't teaching the content. I know the content cold. The hard part is pacing. The AP exam covers thermodynamics, equilibrium, kinetics, electrochemistry, acid-base chemistry, and more, all at a college level, and I have 168 class days to cover it. I plan backwards from the exam date. We have to be done with new content by April 20th so we have three weeks of review. Every time I lose a day to a snow day or a pep rally or a standardized testing window, I'm recalculating. Last month we lost two days to state testing. Two days of AP Chem gone. I cut my buffer week for kinetics and went straight from rate laws into equilibrium. The kids felt it. Amara, one of my strongest students, said "Mr. Aldridge, we're going really fast right now." Yeah. I know. We lost two days to the SOL tests and the AP exam doesn't care.

You mentioned behavior referrals eating into your planning period.

Right. OK so I have one planning period a day. 50 minutes. And I teach five classes. For 126 students, I get 50 minutes to plan, grade, make copies, respond to emails, call parents, and write up any behavior documentation from the day.

Last Wednesday, during my planning period, I had to write up a behavior referral for a student in my third-period class who threw a pencil at another student. Not in a joking way. In an angry way. The referral form is in a system called Infinite Campus. It takes about 12 minutes to fill out because you have to describe the incident, the intervention you tried, the student's response, prior incidents, and what consequence you're recommending. Then I had to email the student's parent, which is another 8 minutes because you have to be very specific and neutral and document-friendly. "On March 12, during third period, your son threw a pencil at another student after a verbal disagreement. I spoke with him privately and he expressed frustration about..." You have to write these emails knowing they might get forwarded to the principal, the school board, or a lawyer. So you're careful.

That's 20 minutes of my 50-minute planning period gone on one student's behavior in one class. I had four other classes that day. I needed to prep a lab for tomorrow's AP class, which means printing the lab handout, checking that the acid solutions are prepared, and making sure I have enough beakers because two broke last week. I got about half of that done. The rest happened after school.

What's yours?

How much you know about your students' lives that you can't do anything about. In the lab, at Merck, the samples didn't have home lives. A vial of solution doesn't come in Monday morning having not eaten since Friday afternoon. I had a student last semester, a junior, who was visibly exhausted every day. Falling asleep in class. I pulled her aside and she told me she was working at a gas station until midnight three nights a week because her family needed the income. She was 16. She was doing stoichiometry on four hours of sleep. I adjusted her deadlines. I let her come to tutoring during lunch. That's all I could do.

In the lab, when an experiment failed, I ran it again with different parameters. In teaching, when a student is failing, the parameters are their entire life, and I don't control any of them. I control 50 minutes a day in a room with a whiteboard. That's my sphere. Everything else, the sleep, the home, the money, the trauma, walks in the door with them and sits in the chair and I teach to it. You don't learn that in the career-switcher program. You learn that in October of your first year when a kid tells you something and you go sit in your car at 4 PM and stare at the steering wheel.

You're five months into your first year. How's it going?

Honestly? I would describe it as the hardest thing I've ever done. And I don't say that in a cute way. I mean there are days where I sit in my car after school and I'm just, like, numb. I don't cry anymore, which I guess is progress? I cried twice in October. Once in the supply closet because a student told me my class was boring in front of the whole room and I didn't know what to do with my face. And once at home because I spent four hours making a lesson about symbolism in "The Outsiders" and only about six kids engaged with it and the rest were talking or on their phones. Four hours of my Sunday for six kids. That ratio is, I don't know. It's demoralizing if you think about it too long.

But also, there are these moments. Like last week. I have a student named Jaylen who is very smart and very checked out. He reads at a 10th grade level but turns in maybe 30% of his work. I'd been trying to get him to engage for months. I put "The House on Mango Street" in front of him because I thought the short chapter format might work. He read three chapters during silent reading time. At the end of class he came up to my desk and said "Miss Reyes, this doesn't suck." That's a Jaylen five-star review. He's been reading it every day since. I almost sent his mom a text about it and then realized I should just let it be. Not everything has to be a parent contact.

What surprised you most about the job?

The sheer amount of stuff that has nothing to do with teaching English. Before this year, if you'd asked me what an English teacher does, I would have said: teach kids to read and write. That is technically true. But it's like saying a restaurant is a place where people eat food. There's a whole building full of chaos happening around the eating.

I spend a huge chunk of my time on things like: entering grades into Synergy, which is our grading platform, and it crashes at least once a week. Documenting accommodations for my 504 students. I have four kids on 504 plans and two on IEPs, and each plan has specific accommodations I'm legally required to follow. Extended time on tests. Preferential seating. Assignments broken into smaller chunks. I track all of this on a spreadsheet I made because the district system is confusing and my mentor teacher, a woman named Mrs. Callahan, told me on day one: "Keep your own records. If a parent or an advocate asks, you need to show compliance."

Then there's the behavioral stuff. I have 132 students across five periods. Of those 132, probably 8 to 10 have significant behavior challenges on any given day. Talking over me. Getting out of their seat. Getting into arguments with each other. Throwing things. One kid, not in a mean way, just kind of tosses his eraser cap across the room and it lands on another kid's desk and now those two kids are in a thing and I have to stop my lesson about figurative language to deal with eraser politics. That happens constantly. The micro-disruptions. Each one is small. The accumulation is exhausting.

You bought your own classroom library. Tell me about that.

Yeah. So the school has a library but it's open two periods a day because the librarian is part-time. And the books in there are, I mean, some of them are great but a lot of them are beat up and the selection hasn't been updated in a while. I wanted my kids to have books in the room. Books they could see, touch, pick up without asking permission. I went to Half Price Books on a Saturday in August, before school started, and I spent $340 on about 80 books. Young adult fiction, mostly. Some graphic novels. A few poetry collections. Some nonfiction about sports and true crime because that's what 7th graders actually want to read.

I organized them by genre with little color-coded labels on the spines. The fantasy section has a waitlist. I'm not kidding. Kids have to sign up on a clipboard to borrow "Percy Jackson" books. The poetry section has been checked out twice, both times by a girl named Daniela who writes her own poems in a composition notebook during free time. I love Daniela. She's the student I imagined having when I pictured myself as a teacher. The other 131 are the students I actually have, and they're great in different ways, but Daniela is the one who makes me feel like I know what I'm doing.

How's the support for first-year teachers at your school?

I have a mentor teacher, Mrs. Callahan, like I mentioned. She's a 20-year veteran who teaches 8th grade English. She is the reason I haven't quit. That's not an exaggeration. She's across the hall and when I'm having a bad day, I can go to her room during my prep and she'll just, like, listen. She doesn't give me advice unless I ask. She mostly says things like "that sounds hard" and "your first year is survival, not excellence." Which is both comforting and depressing because I got into this job wanting to be excellent.

Beyond Mrs. Callahan, the support is minimal. We have new teacher meetings once a month, facilitated by a district coach. The meetings are about things like "creating a positive classroom culture" and "using data to drive instruction." Both of those are real concepts that I'm sure matter. But when I'm in the meeting, I'm thinking about the fact that a student called me a name during fifth period and I don't know how to write up the referral because the behavior form has 14 fields and I don't know what "prior interventions attempted" means when my intervention was saying "please sit down" seven times in escalating tones. The gap between what the PD is about and what my day is about is, it's wide. I nod a lot in those meetings.

What does a good day look like?

A good day is when I get through my lesson in all five periods. That's it. That's the bar right now. Not "my lesson was great." Just "I taught the thing I planned to teach and didn't have to abandon it because of a fight or a fire drill or an unannounced assembly." Last Friday was a good day. We did a close reading of a poem, "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost, because we're reading "The Outsiders" and it appears in the book. I had them read it three times. Once silently, once aloud as a class, once with a partner. Then we annotated. And in third period, a boy named Mateo, who barely speaks in class, who I've honestly been worried about because he just sits there looking at his desk most days, Mateo raised his hand and said "I think 'dawn goes down to day' means, like, even the beginning of something is already ending." And the room was quiet for a second. And I said "Yeah. That's exactly what it means." And Mateo kind of half-smiled. And that was enough. That was the whole day being worth it because of eight words from a kid who never talks.

What's yours?

How lonely it is. I graduated with 14 other people from my alt-cert cohort. We were going to change education. We had study groups and group chats and this, like, energy. Then August started and everybody went to their own school and we're all drowning in our own buildings and nobody has time to check in because when you have 132 kids and five preps and parent emails and grading and you're also 23 and trying to have some kind of life outside of school, there's nothing left.

I eat lunch in my classroom. Alone. Because the 22 minutes of lunch are the only 22 minutes of quiet I get. Some teachers eat in the lounge and I know the social part would be good for me but I physically need the silence. My roommate Bri, she works in marketing at a healthcare company, and she'll come home and tell me about her day and it sounds like a different planet. She went to a brainstorming meeting that had snacks. She had a one-on-one with her manager. She left at 5 and went to a yoga class. My day ended with me trying to convince a 12-year-old that paragraph structure matters while the kid next to him was poking him with a mechanical pencil. Then I went home and graded 26 essays until 10 PM. I love Bri but sometimes when she's talking about her day I just... I can't. The gap is too wide. She has no idea what this is.