The Big Picture

Welcome reader. I'm Sarah Norrbom and I'm a 34-year public school educator and this is a blog about all the things I wished I'd done or did, had I known then what I know now. I've read that the greatest loss to industry, especially education, is when a veteran retires and takes all their knowledge and wisdom with them. We don't have great mechanisms for passing that hard-won experience down. And it's a shame, because teaching, leading, working with parents, figuring out administrators, funding, internal politics etc., etc., is all really hard! I've worked at all levels of the system, teacher - secondary and elementary -, principal, district office, and county office levels. It's been quite a ride. Oh, and I've also been a single mom, doctorate student, cancer survivor, and mother to a neurodivergent kiddo who has been in Special Ed. since she was nine (she's 24 now). So, don't think all we're going to discuss is school. My hope is to engage you with an insider's perspective, at least this insider's perspective, of what all those experiences meant and did to shape my career and my life, and what, if anything, I would have done differently if I could. Maybe, I can spare a little pain and suffering to those who may read what I offer.

I started young, 22 straight out of college. I have a multisubject teaching credential and two Supplemental Authorizations in English and Life Science, which allow me to teach those two subjects up to 9th grade. So, in spite of the fact that I had only student taught in 3rd and 5th grades, and because I lived in the Central Valley and was dying to get out of there, I took a job teaching 8th Grade Science and moved to Napa. I fell in love with the wine country when my step-dad used to run marathons and signed up for the Napa Marathon when I was a kid. He ran it twice and all I could think about was how beautiful the Napa Valley was and how badly I wanted to live there. So, with all the bravado ignorance supplies, I moved to Napa having never taught a teenager before in my life. My students were 7 years younger than I was, and my classes were very diverse, which I was surprised by. In fact, I think most people would be surprised to learn that Napa Valley Unified is comprised of about 30% socio-economically disadvantaged students, has more than 5 language groups, although Spanish is by far the leading language after English, and extends to American Canyon, a working-class, highly diverse, neighborhood about 20 minutes south of Napa proper on Hwy 29.

That first year, was literally Hell. I went to bed crying every night and woke up with an expletive each morning. It was trial by fire, no kidding. I later had a mentor who said, if you can just make it to Halloween, it's all downhill from there. She's mostly right, closer to Thanksgiving, but I did make it and it did get easier. But there were some things I figured out about myself that were really important to my later success at the middle school level, important and humbling.

I grew up in small-town USA, Central Valley California. My grandparents settled there and my grandfather, a physician, established a medical office. Later, my mother, a nurse-practitioner, worked there too. I grew up in a well-educated family, who had high expectations of me. I ultimately attended a small private university and settled on becoming an educator. Growing up in these conditions, and having had about as worldly of an experience as a white, small-town, middle-class young woman could have, I discovered two things; I didn't know anything about my students, nothing, and I also knew precious little about myself. I followed the rules most of my life, was good in school, picked a profession, did well and graduated. Welcome to adulthood. I was entirely unprepared for what lie ahead. And I figured it out within a week of being on the job. Everything in my being wanted to quit, except the bit of pride I had that simply would not allow me to go home to my family, a toss out.

I had lost control of my class, completely, in the first few weeks and spent the rest of the year, clawing back my power. BIG MISTAKE. If you lose ground in the very beginning, getting it back is next to impossible, especially with teens. I didn't like how it felt to have an "me versus them" atmosphere in my class. And I couldn't help but feel like it was me, that was making it that way. It wasn't like that with every kid, or even every class. But, there were some kids and certain mixes of kids, that I knew in the first 10 minutes of class, if I didn't set the tone, they were going to be disruptive the entire time. The discipline policy of the school then was to write a name on the board as a warning, and then a check mark was 30 minutes detention after school, two check marks was 60. "Assertive discipline" it was called. I got the hang of it, and kids did back off but I didn't like the wall it put up between them and me. It just made me feel like I was failing at something really critical to teaching. I later learned, that was building relationships with kids.

I managed to get through that year, and had to admit two things; I refused to go back to work if I was going to have another year like that, and I had to do something to make me a better teacher. I missed college and learning, so I decided to go back to school and work on my Master's. I found a great program in a nearby university, in "International and Multicultural Studies". It was the first time I was a minority in my classes. All of my professors were people of color. I tripped over myself a few times in class and got some scorching lessons, like the time my Anthropological Foundations of Linguistics professor brought in posters of various people from different countries in Africa and I noticed how very different all of the ethnic groups looked, physically. How different Ethiopian people looked from Nigerian people, or from Moroccan people, Egyptian, etc. And I had the nerve to voice that astonishment out loud. My professor, a powerful and wise older black woman said, "Say what you just said, again." You could have heard a pin drop in a class of 23 students. I said, "I had no idea there was such cultural and ethnic diversity in Africa." I sat there my eyes wide, a bit of a smile on my face, thinking I'd noticed something for the first time that was innocent and charming. She just sat still and didn't speak, let me marinate with what I'd said for a bit. Then I remembered her previous lessons about how Africa was a continent that 5 United States could fit in. That its cultures had been engineering pyramids and navigating the stars for thousands of years before white folks even came down from the mountains with picks and axes. There was a long pause, too long, and then I said, "Oh."

The learning I gained from that program and all the professors that helped me understand a broader perspective, a world far beyond the one I lived and grew up in, helped me understand what was missing in my teaching. I couldn't build relationships with my students if I had no idea where they were coming from. I couldn't be authentic with them, if my expectations were, they behaved like me. That summer I also participated in UC Berkeley's Science Project through Lawrence Livermore Labs, which greatly improved my science teacher skills. Those two things set me up for 6 more years of successful science instruction with 8th graders. Ultimately, I left to explore elementary education which led to a career as a principal, but I never forgot those key lessons that opened my eyes to my kids and helped me see what I needed to see.

Today, there are many more teachers in classrooms which represent their students and I believe that's a wonderful thing. Students need to see themselves in the people before them. Teaching and learning methods have improved immensely since I started too. I pity the poor students I taught in those handful of first years. Yikes! The moral of my story to any for whom it applies, when you first start out in teaching stay open to continuous learning yourself. There is so much to try to figure out at once. Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself, is to keep filling your toolbox with new tools. And maybe, forgive yourself a little, no one at 22, 23, 24... really knows everything about who they are and what their profession demands of them. Expect to grow and know you'll make mistakes. There's always tomorrow. I know I've described the story of a privileged person with access. But any person can seek out professional development opportunities at their district or county office, for free or inexpensively. These days, low-cost webinars and guided book clubs are also great ways to discover the latest evidence in teaching and learning. I recently attended one myself, for Peter Liljendahl's "Thinking Classrooms". If I had to do it over again, I think I might have been more thoughtful about the grade level I was taking on. Beyond that, I don't regret anything. I'm sorry I was so naive, but while the lessons were painful, they were necessary and maybe that was all a part of the bigger picture.