The halls were silent when I stepped into Huntsville High School. The lockers were closed, the floors were polished, and the walls were bare of student work or announcement flyers.
My first day as an 11th-grade English teacher was a week away. I was petrified. It wasn’t the students who scared me, nor was it the idea of building lessons or teaching novels that might put whole classes to sleep. I was scared about how much I cared. Like most first-year teachers, I came into education with dreams of dazzling my students, like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.
I wanted to transform kids’ lives with my wit and wisdom, introducing them to obscure texts to awaken a potential they never saw in themselves. That fantasy died a quick death. Within my first two weeks of teaching, one of my students was killed in a drive-by shooting. Another was diagnosed with brain cancer. But I wasn’t deterred…