“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” —Aristotle On my first official day as a Duval County Public School employee (aka when I got my new email address), I wrote this quote in my signature. Email signatures are kind of my guilty pleasure (who doesn’t love a good email signature??), but it also served as a small reminder to myself. First, to remain humble because I studied philosophy in college and became a teacher by choice, which means that I have so much to learn. Second, to remember that philosophy is and always will be a big part of my life. Third, and most importantly, that in this work, there are simply things that I do not know how to do—no matter how many Professional Development sessions I attend, how many veteran teachers I talk to, how many books I read—until I do it myself. When I came back for my second year, I felt more at ease. And it wasn’t the kind of ease that …

I don’t know about you, but this past week didn’t feel like a short week at all! Even though I got an extra day off on Labor Day weekend because of Hurricane Hermine last Friday, I still feel restless and exhausted. I just wrapped up my first month of teaching and I’m halfway through the first nine weeks of school. Honestly, though, it feels like I’ve been doing this for a lot longer. I’ve experienced a lot of growth in the short four weeks that I’ve been in the classroom on my own, and most of that growth happened this week in particular. Some background: I teach 8th grade science, which is considered a “high accountability” position, as my students have to take a state end-of-course exam. The exam covers materials from 6th-8th grade, so after I finish teaching 8th grade material in the fall (Earth & Space Science, my favorite!), I spend most of the spring semester reviewing 6th and 7th grade standards and preparing my students for the test. The exam is scored similar …

A lot has happened in my life since my last blog post. I currently have 3 drafts on queue that were all unfinished and written at different times in the past six weeks. When it comes to blogging, I’m not gonna lie, I treat it like a college paper sometimes. Grammar has to be as on point as possible (not perfect because let’s be honest English is my second language and I struggle with prepositions), and I’ve got to have a nice intro and ending. If I could find a nice metaphor or imagery throughout it, even better! With blogging, I don’t have a deadline, and I sometimes don’t have to turn it in. So if I start to forget the purpose or “end message” of my post in the middle of writing, I usually quit. If I had learned anything from the past few weeks, it’s that I can’t write or live my life like that anymore. The word that comes to my mind that perfectly describes the past six weeks is humbling. Truly humbling. But before …

For almost half of my life, I’ve been fortunate enough to call Greenville home. My family moved to this charming small town from the bustling metropolitan of Jakarta in December 2004, six days after my eleventh birthday. Since then, we have moved three times, I was educated here from fifth grade to four years of undergrad, and we never stopped commuting. One of my favorite stories is discovering that my fifth-grade teacher’s son attended Furman at the same time as I did, though he was a year older. It’s the little things like these that remind me of Greenville’s endless small-city perks that have made such a large impact in my life, one that admittedly I neglected to realize until just a few days ago. Today, I’m preparing to embark on the next phase of my journey. For those who don’t know, I have accepted a position with Teach For America in Jacksonville. I passed the Florida Teaching Certification Exam yesterday and I’ll be teaching Middle School General Science. While I know that I wasn’t an …