When I moved up to Syracuse, the only job I could get was as a teaching assistant at Elmcrest in a special ed. inclusion classroom, something I admittedly knew little about and something that initially seemed so far away from what I wanted. I went to college to become a high school history teacher, but that degree and certification were rendered useless in New York, so I had to start over.
The classroom I started out in was a challenge for a variety of reasons, but I persisted, and at the end of the school year, there were a couple of head teachers that were leaving, and one day, I got called into the office, and the director and the assistant director asked me if I wanted to take the role of a lead teacher, but not only that, they offered to pay for me to get my master’s and certification. This felt like too good of an opportunity to pass up. By the time I had finished my first year, I was in a little more of a grove, and I had come to love the kids I was working with. So although I was unsure that this was exactly what I wanted, I figured I might as well do it.
I was given three years to complete the Special Ed and Early Childhood program at Syracuse University, and I started in the Spring Semester of 2021, so I had until the end of 2024 to finish. The program itself technically only takes one year, if you take all the classes when assigned, but since I worked full time, this was untenable, and work would only pay for two classes at a time, which was fine by me.
My first class was a literacy education class, which was interesting, but it was also tough. I did well, but I had like no background in literacy intervention, so I was getting bombarded with new information, and this made me worried for how the rest of my degree was going to go, but thankfully that was one of the harder classes, and it ended up helping me, because on the certification exams, one of them was on literacy, and I would have been so screwed without that class. I just wish that I had taken it closer to the exam, because so much of that information was lost.
The class that I think was probably the most useful was the behavior intervention class. Going back to teaching middle school, I think the area that I struggled with the most was classroom management and knowing how to keep behaviors under control, and although by the time I took the class, I was much more confident in my ability to this, the way it framed behaviors and how we respond to them was super helpful. There were many days when I would leave class, and then at my next meeting with my staff in my classroom I would share what I learned.
My favorite class that I took was on mindfulness. I know it taught about how to use mindfulness in the classroom and how to help kids regulate their emotions, but I took some of the meditation activities for myself, and I started to do them in my daily life, and they are so helpful. (I should probably do better in incorporating them into my class every day instead of just on random occasions.) Every day now I do a breathing meditation that lasts at least six minutes. It revolves around taking a deep breath in and holding it for at least six seconds, and then slowly releasing it. Technically while doing this you are supposed to focus on an area of your body that is hurt or has tension, but I typically do it while watching a movie, so it is more just the breathing for me, but I always feel so much better after.
The overarching theme of the whole program though was inclusion. Inclusion is the idea that special ed students can and should be in classes with everyone else. They should be in rooms with their peers instead of down the hall in a room by themselves or in the basement of a school where no one usually goes. A core tenet in this is presuming competence. Many times the kids get thrown in their special class, and then the teachers do not challenge them, and they give them the most basic of material, and as they get older they do not really make it harder, and unless they are given a chance to show you that they can do it, then you will not know what they are capable of doing.
Sadly, a big problem with this is that many school districts still are not pushing for inclusion, and they are not set up for it. If done poorly, then the students with special needs will get left behind, but if done correctly everyone can get along, and all the students are the better for it. In a world where discrimination is under the microscope in almost every industry, special ed still seems to escape the eye and criticism of most people, but their rights should not be ignored. So now every time I sit in an IEP meeting for one of my kids moving up to kindergarten, I feel a level of responsibility to try and keep them out of a class that is solely filled with students with special needs, and every time this happens, I feel like I have failed a little bit.
Overall, I do think that the program was very helpful, but at times it did feel repetitive. This could be because I was taking the classes over a course of three years, and it was supposed to be only one year, so maybe the classes were meant to compliment themselves at the same time, but even then, I still think there was a large amount of overlap. Also I still think it was ridiculous that they made me take an undergrad math class, because I only had one undergrad math credit. Like this should not have been taken into account at all.
To be honest though, the math class was so different from everything else that I had taken that it ended up being one of my favorite classes that I took as a part of my degree. It was also super weird though. It was like a first-year undergrad class, so my class was literally filled with 18 year olds, and they were all girls, so I felt super out of place, but thankfully I was pretty good at doing the math, which I did not expect at all, and I ended up doing really well!
I ended up with a 4.0 GPA for my master’s. I got an A in every single class, which is cool. I worked really hard, and it was mostly the kind of work that I think I excel at, reading and writing papers, plus it was all about teaching, which I probably spend more time doing than anything else in my life, except sleeping. So do I think that the master’s program made me a better teacher, yes, but I also think that what has made me an even better teacher is actually teaching.
My first year as head teacher in the preschool classroom, I felt like I was out over my skis. I could not have done it without the help of the other teachers in my classroom, and with each passing year, I feel like I get so much better. Part of that is undoubtedly the supplemental learning that I got from SU, but also continually being put into different real-world situations in the classroom helps with being actually being able to solve them instead of just theoretically discussing them.
So I feel forever indebted to work for helping me accomplish this and for allowing me to not spend all of my money in doing so. I am also beyond grateful for all of the people that work in my classroom, for not only helping me grow, especially that first year, but they also had to hold the fort down without me for a total of 12 weeks when I had to student teach in two different places, and there was also a semester, where I had to go to a different school every Friday, so they did a ton of heavy lifting to help me get this thing done. I am beyond happy that it is done, but also now I feel a little lost? The lack of class has left a bog void.
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