Heading Back to 8th Grade

In 2024 I left the classroom at the end of my contract. My son moved me in February of that year into another county 3 counties over. The commute to finish out my contract was brutal some days. Leaving early to get to work. Getting home late due to traffic in the afternoon. Some days I was so tired I’d fall asleep driving.

Then came two years of not finding a teaching job.

It is heart wrenching when you can’t find a teaching job for two years. When you are out of the classroom for that long, you wonder if your teaching skill are rusty.

In February of this year, I stepped back into the classroom briefly with 7th graders that seemed to be feral. I say that not so lightly. They were a rough bunch. Some years, you have that. Some years you have students who are rough around the edges. You endure and the next year, things are fine.

Either way, I left that experience with a brand new appreciation for teaching routines and procedures. I also realized that how I taught procedures and routines needed to go back to my old school method: No cutesy slides, but instead straightforward, to the point, and practice, practice, practice.

A month later, I went to a job interview and was offered a position in 8th grade.

After 2 years, I will be going back into the 8th grade with a new appreciation for classroom management. To make it even better, I went online and looked at the curriculum map to see what I would be teaching this school year. I was pleasantly surprised to see so many texts that I’ve previously taught. This means that I have most all of my lessons already created (with the exceptions of maybe 4) for the entire year. This makes things so much easier.

I can’t wait to teach some of my favorite texts: “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Monkey’s Paw,” “The Diary of Anne Frank” the play, “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh,” “Harriet Tubman,” “Frederick Douglass,” and “Auschwitz.” Plus, the new standards in SC focus on teaching rhetoric, which I am a huge fan of teaching. Before, our standards placed that in 9th grade English and up. Now, we bring that down to 7th grade and up. Rhetoric is something that students need to know in this day and time. Too often, they don’t realize they are being persuaded through fancy words or even carefully placed images or phrases meant to elicit a specific response. This is a necessary skill with so much of our information coming through social media and the internet.

Anyhow, just know that you will be able to follow along with my journey in 8th grade as I navigate my new job. I can’t wait! Make sure to follow me on my Facebook page where you will see more updates than in the blog.