I always really liked school, and I loved being in school at ADM because I grew up here, and my whole family grew up here. My parents graduated from Adel High School, and my siblings and I graduated from Adel-Desoto High School. So this was the only place I wanted to teach, and I interviewed at other places, but I never felt like it was the right fit. My heart just wasn’t in it, in being somewhere else.
I can’t imagine being loyal to another school. Even when I started Dallas Center, it was really hard because they were a rival of ours when I was in school.
When I was a student teacher, I also did my student coaching for track. It was hard for me to want the girls I was coaching to do better than the girls at ADM, so I just felt like this (ADM) is where I wanted to be.
I didn’t get a job right away, like I said, for 4 years, I feel I kinda half heartedly interviewed at other places. I feel like I kind of sabotaged myself and didn’t give my best effort because I was like I don’t want to teach here, and I kept waiting for there to be an opening here (ADM). But my original major was history, and it was really hard at that point (the late 90s) for females to get into that subject area because that typically went to the football coaches and stuff.
So I subbed for a while, and then I actually left the teaching profession because I needed to get a full-time job, and I just didn’t want to teach somewhere else but then one thing after another happened so I felt like it was just something telling me that I needed to get back into education. So I decided to try to get my foot in the door here. I’m just going to apply to be a teacher’s associate, and if there is an opening, hopefully I’ll get hired. But what happened was two weeks before school started, they still had two special education positions open, and so they called me and were like “would you be interested in trying this?” so I thought about it and I was like yeah I’ll give it a try because I wanted to teach here. And it just kind of ended up being my niche, and I got to teach here full-time.
When I first came back to teaching full-time in 2001, it was kind of weird because many of the teachers I had had were still here, and it was really weird to come back and call them by their first names as a coworker. It was comforting to have people that I knew, but to be on that level with them regularly after being their student was different. But over time, and the longer I taught here, the more I felt like more of a colleague and equal to them. They’ve all just kind of retired over the year. I mean, this is my 24th year teaching here, so I’ve been here for a minute. So now I’m kind of like the veteran teacher.
It’s been interesting to see how things have changed over time. For example, this building was brand new when I was a sophomore in high school, and so the room that I teach in now used to be part of what was the library. I try to explain that to people all the time, and that’s why I have this weird wall in my room.
My room, Miss Gude’s room, Mr. Perman’s room, Mr Jones’s room, and Mr. Schnebbe’s room used to all be the library. The science wing wasn’t there, so that wall was just windows that looked into the woods behind the school.
So the building structure has changed, and the middle school addition has been added. That has been fun to be a part of.
Teaching itself has changed a lot over the time I’ve been here. When I first started teaching here, we didn’t have laptops; we each had our desktop computer, and as a new teacher who didn’t know how things were created, I was learning as I went. I was taking classes and getting training while teaching. I spent hours here by myself on the weekends because I didn’t have a computer at home. One thing that I do as part of my job is individual education programs for each of my students. We used to have to handwrite each one of those, but now that’s all online.
When I first started teaching, we had a computer lab, and if you needed your students to do something online, you’d have to reserve the lab. Then, over time, we started getting computer carts you could roll into the room and check them out if you were going to have your kids do something on a computer. Then we had the transition, to each of you kids had your computer now. Which has its positives and its negatives.
There are so many things that we can do, and we can work on stuff at home, but there are also the downfalls of kids doing things they shouldn’t be doing online when they should be paying attention in class.
So, technology has been a big change over the years. The way that we grade has changed a lot. We used to just have a straight scale with percentages, and if you didn’t turn stuff in, it was a zero. There weren’t any reassessments, so it was as if you didn’t do well; it would take you a while to dig out of that hole and bring your grade back up. Which is why the theory over time has changed that we want to give kids a chance to make up for those things and not tank their grade at the beginning of the semester, and not have any hope of getting out of it.
So now, at the beginning of the semester, maybe you couldn’t do this thing, but at the end of the semester, you can, so it gives you more opportunities to show growth rather than just being like No, you failed that and you can’t do it again.
We used to always have an 8-period day, and I thought I would hate block schedules, but then once I got used to it, liked it a lot better than 8-period days now because there’s less transitions and a longer period to get things accomplished, so that you don’t have to spend so much time on things outside of school.
I love teaching at ADM, like I said, I was never able to see myself anywhere else because my heart wasn’t in it. I wouldn’t change my job for the world.
