High School Teacher

One of my hardest experiences was my first year of teaching. I was in my 30s, and I had a girl in the flute section right in the middle of a march take a switchblade out of her coat sleeve, and I realized I couldn't take it away from her, so I just used in my big teacher voice put it on my music stand, and she did, and then I called the vice principal.

I would have to say the hardest thing about being a high school teacher is classroom management. Especially if you're teaching like at the high school level, you hit about sixth period. If you have a class full of freshmen and or students with IEPs, sometimes that can be a real challenge. And a lot of it is just having rules, having the you know the wherewithal to enforce those rules. And then also make a connection with the students as best you can. Let them know you care a little bit about them. Maybe call home, but don't always call in a negative way. Maybe call if a student does something good that day. Call and let them know everything was working out pretty good. And then you know just really work with the students. That's the hardest part is just classroom management, especially when you first start out. I remember thinking maybe this is not the profession for me when I first started, but eventually I got my feet under me and I figured it out and that was it.

One of my hardest experiences was when we were at a festival and I had a show choir and all of a sudden we realized we didn't have our outfits and we were in a festival where you had to change four outfits to go with your four songs. Well, we went down to Walmart and I used my charge card and got some scissors and mothers and in our motel rooms we made some outfits in like less than six hours and ended up almost, I think we got like first or second place. And I was blown away with creativity we can come up with when you're under stress.

I had lots of hardest experiences. My first four years of teaching I taught in the state mental hospital in Nebraska because I went to Nebraska for my teaching degree and I saw some pretty horrible things there. Some kids that were really in bad shape but I like to think that I got my best teaching experience there as far as being a veteran teacher. One year I was teaching fourth grading, getting ready to go to KU, getting my master's degree and somebody was patting on the window and I looked in the window my students were all sitting there and there was a gun in my face and I had to call, we had to call the police and I didn't go back to school until the superintendent called me and told me that the person had been caught and they were just trying to scare a white woman which they did and I ended up getting out of that district. That was probably the hardest except for the kid who had to testify against his mom in court because she starved his brothers to death in the third grade.