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Teaching: Why I Choose to STAY

Doug Robertson (@TheWeirdTeacher) posted recently on Twitter about his frustration with the quitting martyr teacher posts that always seem to go viral on Facebook about this time of year.  Shared by educators and non-educators alike.  I've seen them, of course. We've all seen them.  I've read them, and I hear their words.  They decide to burn it down when they leave, I suppose, filled with frustration and anger and sadness, too, perhaps. But Doug's Twitter thread really resonated with me, y'all.  And then this morning someone in the thread (@MoniseLSeward) suggested we use the hashtag #WhyIChooseToStay to share our stories. Yeah, I son't know that it was necessarily meant as an actual call to share, but I loved the idea, so here's mine. I just completed year 28 as an educator. I've been a kindergarten teacher, an elementary teacher of grades 2,3,4,5, an elementary school teacher-librarian, an intermediate school teacher-librarian, a middle scho
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Sticky Wickets, or things they don't teach you in library school

I"m going into my 29th year as an educator this year---9 in the classroom, and headed into my 20th year as a school librarian. I've worked in elementary, middle, and now high school as a librarian. You might say I've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly throughout the years. Through it all--the good times and the bad--I've always firmly believed I have the best gig in the universe.  I love what I do, and I have a true passion for it. I had a brilliant professor in library school named Betty Carter.  She used to talk about how meeting difficult characters or situations in a book before you met them in real life was so helpful to young people because it gave them the chance to think through it and figure out best ways to handle it ahead of time.  I hope that you will read this list in much the same vein.  Especially for all my new-to-the-library friends, this is not a list of mere complaints, but a list of possible scenarios for you to brainstorm about so that wh
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Read Across America

Life is weird, y'all. It is ever-changing. Sometimes we don't even realize how things in our childhood were until we look back at them with what we know now through a modern lens--not the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. Dr.Seuss is has gone from a wocket in the pocket to a very sticky wicket. I was born in 1970. I grew up loving all the rhyming and wacky colorful books in the world of Seuss.  I became a teacher in the early '90s and my elementary kiddos also loved his books. Dr. Seuss's birthday was a HUGE deal and we celebrated it wearing red and white striped hats and blue wigs and thinking about Mulberry Street. And yet... I can also remember loving my Saturday mornings with Fat Albert and his crew.  I enjoyed Jell-o commercials.  My teen years were spent at the Cosby house via the TV.  I still giggle upon hearing "Dad is great, he feeds us chocolate cake." Bill Cosby was everybody's dad , for Pete's sake. Until he wasn't. Once
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