It didn’t really. You believed I was that old??? Thanks a lot.

When I started teaching several decades ago, we teachers used paper gradebooks. I kept those pages meticulously ordered, and all in pencil. Teachers used actual chalkboards at my school, and we handed out worksheets made either on mimeograph machines, or soon thereafter, on Xerox machines. There was usually one such machine per school, and it was usually broken.

I depended heavily on meeting and talking with other more experienced teachers to help me navigate this unknown world. Not being an education major, I never had worked with a mentor teacher of any kind. That year, in fact I was hired to teach at my old middle school. There I navigated the complexities of middle school behavior and unfamiliar curriculum. One of the classes I was assigned (since I had told the administration that I was a musician) was Music Appreciation, a new elective for which there was no written curriculum at all.

Every day I came up with ideas for song lyrics to analyze: it is the course I determined to be best for my skill sets. I would go home and literally type up song lyrics to works by The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, all of these poetic-type songwriters. In conjunction, I would bring in a portable cassette player, and play the recorded songs while the class read and “analyzed the lyrics.” A few times, I brought in my guitar and had singalongs in class. Once I tried to teach the class how to play percussion by banging on their desks. The neighboring teachers didn’t appreciate it.

However, in a darker turn of events I was also hired to replace a Social Studies teacher retiree. I was temporarily double certified for Social Studies and English, with the latter being my favorite. The history classes, as it turned out, had not been hosted by an actual teacher for several months and hence, students were “swinging from the chandeliers” as they say.

Fast forward a few months, and I had endured one student standing up to shout at the top of her lungs : YOU FUCKING BITCH!!!!!!!! at me, and another student setting fire to a trash bin inside of my classroom. That year, I also started therapy.

It is now many years later, and I must say that it has truly been a journey. Somehow, I stayed with it. During my last decade as a full-time teacher, I taught high school English, from 9th grade to AP Literature and Composition, Humanities (a course I invented for the school), several community college classes, and for many years, Speech and Debate. Now, I teach remotely part-time, and I also have been teaching at a private language school for adults during the past year. I loved teaching after I figured out how to make it possible, palatable, positive and peaceful. If I could not have class environments that were as I just listed ( the four “p’s”), I couldn’t function. Also, if I spent half of my life working outside of school on an unpaid time clock grading papers, I would feel ashamed of myself for having so little pride or value for my time.

In this blog, I am going to tell stories, give advice, provide ideas for happy classrooms AND happy teachers, and direct you to some lessons I think you might enjoy and also need. It is my deep desire to form communication bonds with teachers from all over. I may be starting this a little late, but if I can do ANYTHING to help teachers succeed with their students’ education, especially their secondary LANGUAGE ARTS education, then I will try. If you click on the turquoise link in the previous sentence, you can see some ideas and lessons I have created over the years…

My Teachers Pay Teachers store is called Literary Ladder Lessons, and here is another link: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/store/literary-ladder-lessons

There is absolutely NO AI used in this blog EVER….that is a promise.

Thank you for reading, and please keep reading!! Also, I would LOVE to read your comments. Are you a teacher? Have you ever been?

Ms. Audrey S.

Here is an article about teaching Music Appreciation:

https://www.squiltmusic.com/blogs/news/20-favorite-music-appreciation-lessons