#TheSW30 – Day 12

Last week I posted a blog from The Single Woman‘s 30-day blogging challenge about my thoughts on where my life is now versus where I thought it would be at this point.  Today the challenge asks us to look back at our accomplishments.

Your proudest accomplishment

I have to admit there are many things accomplishments in my life that make me proud.  Some are seemingly insignificant, like getting through a difficult workout.  Some are a lot bigger, like moving from one coast to the other.  But I think the accomplishment that I am most proud of is completing my first year of teaching.  There were several signs that should have been big red flags to me ahead of time that surviving making it to June that first year was not going to be easy.  The first of which was that my first day was on October 31st and up until that point they’d had a series of substitutes.  But not just for those first two months of school.  They had a series of short and long term subs for the previous couple of years.  So I jumped into a class of 8th graders in inner-city Philadelphia who hadn’t had a teacher for longer than a couple of months in a few years…yikes!

My next clue should have been the fact that the School District was offering me a bonus on the first day of my 5th month!  My 22-year-old naive self didn’t realize that that meant a lot of people didn’t make it to the 5th month.  All I saw was some extra dollars for doing what I had wanted to do since I was 4.

During the first few weeks when my students threw desks, cursed at me with more curse words than I had ever heard in my life, refused to participate in class lessons or complete their homework…I should have seen all of those as flashing warning signs.

And if all of those clues weren’t enough, my trip to the emergency room when a student punched me a few weeks onto the job, should have been the biggest red flag of all.

But no, I was determined to not only survive in that teaching environment, but thrive.  And to date that is my proudest accomplishment.  When I met up with the assistant principal in a mall parking lot during the summer so she could ensure that we get my paperwork signed to bring me back the next  year…that was a proud moment.