Today is the first day of my 25th year in education. Feels wild to type those words but yes, I started my career as a middle school teacher in 1999 and twenty five years later I’m still here. I am now a Literacy Coach working at a middle school just two miles from where I started my career and on the first day of my 25th year in education, I cried at school.

I didn’t cry because I was scared. I didn’t cry because I was embarrassed. I didn’t cry because I was frustrated.

I cried because of what I witnessed in a first-year teacher’s classroom.

I work in a traditionally hard-to-staff school in the community of Watts. More often than not, our students get newer, less experienced teachers. Three years ago the majority of our 6th graders didn’t have an English teacher for the first three months of school. When one finally arrived, she was brand new to the profession with no formal teacher training. It was a tough year and students didn’t get the education they deserved. Last year, as 7th graders, they had a similar experience and we were determined to ensure they didn’t have the same experience for their final year of middle school.

Our school was able to hire a first year teacher who, through a residency program, spent last year teaching alongside a mentor teacher. She was part of a cohort of residents who had an intense year of mentorship, teaching, and learning which prepared her to take on a class of her own this year. I got to see this teacher on her first day and boy oh boy was she ready.

When I walked into her class I saw what you might expect from a more experienced teacher. She unpacked learning targets with students so they knew what they were going to learn that day and what was expected of them. She broke down vocabulary that might have been confusing for students before they had to read it on their own. She set up structures for students to engage in small group conversations. She had students clap it up for themselves when they accomplished a task. She set high behavior and academic expectations for students. To support their fluency, she had them choral read and echo read small pieces of text. She had students make name tents so she could call them by their names. She circulated the class, looked at student work, and provided specific and actionable feedback. She crouched down to get to students’ levels when conferring with them. When a student showed enthusiasm for something, she celebrated and encouraged that enthusiasm. All of this on the first day of school.

As I watched these magical moments from the back of the room, I started to tear up.

I cried because I saw our students engage. They talked. They tried. They laughed. They wrote. They spoke. They smiled. One of them even said, to no one in particular, “I think I already like this class.”

I cried because our students who deserve the best were finally getting the educational experiences they should have always had. I teared up as I watched K engage with his peers and the work. He was a student who I distinctly remember as eager and enthusiastic on his first days of 6th grade. As his days without a teacher turned into weeks and then into months, he began to disengage. As a 7th grader, I watched him become the class clown and struggle to turn in assignments, read grade level texts or produce coherent writing. But today, I saw something different. I saw him actually engage in the work. I listened to him have an academic conversation with his peers. I saw him write down his ideas about what it means to be respectful and responsible in an 8th grade English classroom.

I saw all of this because he finally had a teacher who was prepared, committed, joyful, warm and demanding. He finally had the teacher all of our students deserve. And that brought me to tears.