I graduated from the University of Iowa in May of 2024. When I graduated, and previous to that, I was student teaching at (School name) which is part of the West Des Moines School District. They have seventh and eighth graders at that building and I was in seventh grade language arts, and I loved it. It was great, but in your last semester of what I call “teacher school” they make you do student teaching.
I knew that I wanted to teach somewhere in the Des Moines area, because I grew up going to the Waukee school district, and I loved being in the Des Moines area because it’s closer to a bigger city, but it’s not the biggest city. So it feels big but small at the same time, and I knew that I wanted to teach somewhere in the area, and so I started looking really really early on for teaching jobs for English language arts, whether it be middle school or high school, and ADM had one posted as early as January, which is really weird for like, first year teachers to start applying for jobs that early, I guess. But I interviewed and for this job in February, so I was a month and a half into my student teaching, and this was my first interview I did. I felt very nervous going in, but I had done a ton of research on school, and I really liked the values and the size of the school. When I did my tour here, it just felt right, like, the size of the school was perfect.
All of the people that I encountered in the school seemed super nice. I was interviewed by Mrs. Basinger, Mr. Griebel and Mrs. Longman, and that was a fantastic interview team. And so I just got a really good feeling, and a day after I interviewed, I got a call offering me the job, and I was like, yep, I’ll take it. So I was the first one of the 25 people that were graduating with me, with an English education degree to get a job. And that was really cool too.
In May of 2024, about a week before I graduated college, I came in to meet what would be my advisory now. They were eighth graders and they were coming in to kind of see my room and see, like, a little introduction to high school. And so, I got to meet my advisory in May before I was even really a teacher here and just kind of talked to them about what high school was going to be like, and my room wasn’t decorated like it is now.
I love my room. I think it, really does reflect me as a teacher. There’s a lot of chaos in the room, but it’s kind of like an organized chaos that is very joyful and colorful, even though I can’t see all of the colors.
I have a color blindness chart in the back of my room because I got so tired of students asking, “Well what color is this?”, so sometimes I refer them back to the chart. Everything to me is either brown, yellow, blue, gray, or black and white. It’s not too bad when it comes to teaching. I have a very apparently neon wall and I did not know that it was green. Thought that it was probably red because ADM school colors are red, but I also did not know that ADM school colors were red until I started teaching here. Because tigers are usually orange and so I just assumed it was orange.
I am blind in one of my eyes, colorblind in both eyes and I don’t have any peripheral vision at all. So I always tell students that because of that I can hear super well. So because of my deficiency in my eyesight, I’m often able to hear a lot better, which can be a blessing and a curse.
I have a lot of weird “teacher lore” that I can’t wait to drop on some of these students for years to come, and I love this school. It’s the best. I love my coworkers, and my students are an extreme joy. I love coming to work every day. I feel very fortunate to have the best job in the universe. Everybody says teaching is an underpaid job, and it is, but I get paid in watching my kids grow so much, not only in their academics, but in their personalities and growing into human beings that I’ll be proud sending into the world. So it’s the best job in the universe.
