One day I want to talk about what it was like to have been a classroom teacher in multiple settings & content areas (including virtual teaching) and having educators who taught the same grade level for 10+ years thinking they automatically knew more than me because of age. https://twitter.com/krenaep/status/1341905897707237376

Because let me tell you, they will make your life harder than it has to be simply because they think years trumps everything else. It’s one of the things I hate the most about K-12 public education.

I spent the first 2 years of my career teaching a high-stakes grade level & content area in a Title I school. I was the teacher w/twice the number of special education students as my peers and most of the ELL students bc I was certified to teach them too.

Then, the district asked me to move to PreAP/GT bc “those kids need you too.” During this time, I was the Title I Coordinator and was responsible for the after-school program for ~600 MS students. Mind you, I was a first-year teacher.

I was transferred to our district’s early college HS, where I became a department chair & wrote the College Prep curriculum for 9-12. I was doing all types of administrator responsibilities w/o the pay or the title. This is all within my first 4 years of teaching.

When we moved to Brazil, I was asked to come teach full-time at an American/Brazilian International School, which I did. I taught 4 preps there: English 8, Eng 9, US Hist 7, and Humanities 8. Also helped write curriculum there, and 100% of my kids were ELL.

At this time, I was also contracted by Great Minds to help write K-2 curriculum. I was also a virtual teacher for districts in Texas who needed certified teachers for online courses. I did that for 4 years. I was also an SAT tutor & private English instructor.

It was about Year 6 or 7 that I considered moving into administration, and I chose a nonprofit educational org first, but all during these years, I was in graduate school full-time & had gotten my national board certificate. I was learning a lot, & I was doing A LOT.

Add a couple of years, more instructional coaching, curriculum writing, ed research, grad program teaching, school design, etc., and then I went back to public schools to take all that I had learned across all those experiences and do something with it for kids.

And despite the fact that my teaching experiences span far more than many folks who complain the most about number of years teaching, what it gets boiled down to is “Well, she didn’t teach for X years, so what could she know?”

A lot, actually. I know a lot and can do a lot.

Folks think that because it took them X years to “get better” that it takes everyone that long. I’m sorry, but no. You don’t get to project your personal growth onto anyone else. I didn’t need 28 years to figure out where I could do the most good. I figured that out year 1.

It gets under my skin every time I see teachers scoff at people who didn’t stay in a classroom for a decade. Like, I’ve worked next to some of the most mediocre educators, and they were 10+ years in at the time. Let’s not start acting like years are a guarantee of ANYTHING.

You can be critical of leaders and their ability to be solid instructional leaders without purporting some notion that you *need* to have been in a classroom for X years to be worth anything. Just stop it.