Diploma Plus

11.06.09 By Sonya Crocker

My name is Sonya Crocker…a.k.a. Ms. Crocker! I’m an English BTR Resident and part of the Diploma Plus team at Charlestown High School (CHS).

In September, I met my mentors Adina and Kati (Ms. Schecter and Ms. Delahanty). If they were words in the dictionary, this is the definition that would follow: passionate, hard working, tough, creative, brilliant, compassionate, and inspiring.

Even though I had the ideal mentors, I was still anxious. I was mostly anxious about teaching students who were only a few years younger than me. Would they listen to me? Would they respect me? Would they forgive me for not knowing anything about pop culture? Frankly, I was intimidated!

The three of us quickly got to work! We decorated our rooms and hunted for furniture around the school. My project was the Diploma Plus library; over two days, I organized hundreds of books by genre and filled six hefty bookshelves. I was pleased to discover while doing this task that the common texts in Boston Public Schools are more contemporary and multi-cultural than my Texas public high school texts.

In addition to our labor-intensive projects, we had discussions about curriculum and classroom structures. The main questions we explored were: What units are we going to teach during the first month of school? How do we use the Diploma Plus competency-based grading system? What are our rules/principles?

Not soon after I stacked the last books into the Fantasy section of our library, the students trickled into the DP common area. It was the first time I had ever been addressed as “Ms. Crocker.” (I am 23 years old and a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin) The sound of my new name was WEIRD, but I was grateful for anything to differentiate me from my students!

During first weeks of school, we got to know our students—their cultures, interests, goals, and “waterbugs” (a human behavior that “sucks the life” out of them). Our students are between the ages of sixteen and twenty years old; many of them have dropped out of school before, and most of them struggle with attendance. We have students who are working to support their families, and others who are raising their younger brothers and sisters—or their own children. As I established relationships with our students and began to break in my new, shiny teacher shoes, my “will they like me?” jitters evolved into “how do I teach?!” jitters.