Leaving the classroom after a deep bench of teaching - Why? Why Art Therapy? (draft)

My teaching career started after a study abroad in Ecuador to fulfill my own established requirement of "If you are going to major in Spanish, sitting on the couch reading Golden Age texts of Spanish Lit isn't going to do it. You have to learn how to speak fluently." Ecuador opened my eyes and I completed an assignment in Peace Corps after college (Russia)-- very much not Ecuador, but still eye opening. Student debt, however, meant that the wages being paid in other countries weren't going to meet my financial needs, unless I worked in the middle east, and even that was questionable. So I headed home and started in K12, which I referred to as "the trenches of language education". It was all that, and a living wage enough so that I could pay down student debt.

What I found in the schools was that how district policies translated depended tremendously on the principal of the school. Some administrators did amazing work translating federal or state requirements to students who had just arrived from other countries, as well as students who had been born in the states but were still being categorized as language learners. Angela Navarro of Canby School District and Joe Morelock, now in charge of an educational service district, had the heart and awareness of these learners. Both of these Oregon educators knew very well the students who were navigating the systems that sought to create equal access. They also know that the systems often translated into identifying students for what they lacked rather than their strengths. And, they know that this process was often very hard on students and resulted in self identification of being "just not quite enough" which too often resulted in a sense of low expectations of them. Low expectations for a young learner often translated to a sense of exclusion and diminished ambition and motivation.

These were not the intention of the systems that wanted to create equal access, but often this was the result. When looked at critically, it became clear that identifying students for what they lacked and then remediating for years creates a lack of confidence and has a silencing effect on these students. Young learners often don't yet have the resilience to rise above. And, most often these young learners were boys. After years teaching in K12, what i witnessed was language learners who were hobbled by their education rather than fortified.

In my classroom I addressed this regularly and pragmatically, but as the face of the system that was doing this, it was an entirely uphill battle. More often I worked with administrators who didn't know what to do with my students and so focused on following the letter of the law with regards to the testing and placement of students. And having stepped down to part-time when my children were born, I lacked the seniority to make the impact I sought.

It didn't help that those interviewing me couldn't connect my experience teaching in other countries with how I saw my students and the systems which impacted them, because they had never worked overseas in schools.

Additionally, with the crunch of mandated canned curriculum that was not only dry but also failed to meet the students where they were, I found myself feeling like I was capable of much more, but not able to access that space unless I wanted to enter administration. Toward the end, I was experiencing having a teacher 20 years my junior enter my classroom and look for ways in which I wasn't following the curriculum closely enough, correctly enough and then reporting this to my principal. My principal had never actually been a classroom teacher. I found myself thinking "All I had ever wanted to do was be a positive encouraging effective teacher for students who were learning languages. How did I get here?"

Additionally, I noticed that I personally had changed. The quantity of students I saw daily as a secondary teacher, the amount of extroverting left me with little to offer to the people I loved when I returned home-- I was becoming more introverted. The inability to get a classroom with a window, the trauma of my students, the lack of control over my own schedule among other things pressed in and I found myself wanting more to just understand my students as full humans rather than coming at them with an agenda that was mandated from on high.

I wanted to explore the things that came in the way of their learning more than I wanted to try to work around those things. Focusing on their indenting paragraphs and remembering to put periods was not how I wanted to interact with humans. Instead, showing them how art could heal, listening and sitting with their experiences, encouraging their best aims and counteracting the voices that told them they weren't enough was what I wanted.

But aren't you too old to become a student again?

I sat for a year after being accepted to the program with how I would manage this transition financially, analyzed how it would impact people I cared about and whether it was truly worth it. The idea of having my work be something I believed in, something the world needed and it being a better reflection of my innate capacity was so much more energizing than the idea of trying to go sideways in education (which I had already tried as Adjunct Faculty and working for the Federal Migrant Program).

Midway through my first year in the Art Therapy Masters program to earn my LCAT and LPC, I couldn't be happier about the decision I have made. The philosophical shift, the clinical learning, the opportunity for research and just the Learning has re-energized my life in a way I've not recently experienced. I am in the room for conversations that make me think "Oh, people do actually talk about this! I am here with those who speak about what is important to me,". And with each donation to my Go Fund Me that I started to help defray costs I receive as the universe saying "Yes, this is the right thing to do,"

I am still deeply connected to the process of language learning and the young humans who are navigating this in our public K12, but I no longer have to be the face of well intended systems that produce unintended consequences. And I have placed my foot into an entirely new area of learning which can be nothing but good for ones brain.

So for the question of "But aren't you too old to become a student again?", the answer from my corner of the ring is absolutely not. That's for when you are no longer living.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.