Happy New Year!

9.02.10 By Rachel Singh

Autumn has always been my favorite time of year. For students, fall is the harbinger of the new year. The leaves change colors and die, the weather turns crisp (although it was a sweltering 96 degrees today), and we go shopping for pencils and notebooks, backpacks and shoes. If we are brave enough, we may chose to reinvent ourselves for the new school year: cutting our hair, taking up new classes or sports, adopting a new identity. I have been a student for most of my life so far, so autumn is my new year. This year, as I transition from college to work, I still find myself going “back to school” and adopting a new identity for the occasion. I’m coming back to school not as a student, but as a teacher to my students. In reality, I feel much more like a student learning how to be a teacher.

I measure my momentous life events in school years. I learned how to read in first grade, changed schools in seventh, fell in love for the first time in ninth (with a teacher, of course!), met my best friend in tenth. I’ve run out of grades and years in college, so I’m starting over. I’m going back to first grade, where it all began for me. Back to learning how to read and how to get along, back to sharing and snack time and picture books read aloud, back to making friends and learning how to be a whole person who exists in a public setting, outside my family’s love. It is interesting to me that fall will continue to be my new year in this new profession and that at the brink of my adulthood, I’m choosing to return to a world of childhood. Somehow, everything I have learned in the past 16 years has brought me right back where I started in first grade.

My decision to become a teacher springs out of my beliefs about justice and freedom, but all that ideology faded into the background when I stepped into my mentor’s classroom this week. I believe education is about liberation and that public schools are fundamentally democratic institutions that are falling profoundly short of that idea, but beliefs like these are not the only reason people become teachers. My new classroom was filled with small, six-year-old-sized chairs and alphabet charts, wooden blocks and cozy rugs, and books of every shape and size. In all the theory of my graduate classes the past two months, I forgot about all these delightful details that comprise the daily task of teaching. These props reminded me of the little people who will enter my life in six days whose sole responsibility is to learn. They also reminded me that there are faces to this struggle for justice and equity, delightful little humans to whom I owe the most sacred duty of teaching. It’s not just about my big ideals about social justice and radical change; it’s about all these 18 children who are learning how to be people in our society and how it is my job to help teach them. I’m terrified, but I am also thrilled. 

New year, new identities, new challenges, and new joys. Happy New Year! I already know already it’s going to be a good one!