As a first-year math teacher, Matt Baker feels overwhelmed -- especially when his principal is less than supportive.
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Matt Baker is a high school math teacher at The Brooklyn Latin School in Brooklyn, NY. After getting his Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering from Bucknell University, he taught English in Japan for two years and then pretended to use his degree in the private sector for several more. Finally he figured out he should be back in the classroom, so he applied for and received a Math for America fellowship, moved to New York City, and got his Masters of Secondary Math Education. He is currently an MƒA Master Teacher and a Desmos Teaching Fellow, and is very active in the math teacher Twitter community with the handle @stoodle.
This story originally aired on August 17, 2018 in an episode titled “Help.”
Story Transcript
We were relegated to the top floor of a building in East Harlem with no windows, apparently because the designers in the 1970’s thought that East Harlem was too depressing for children to look at. We Googled it.
Our first freshman class was they're good kids. They're a little rough around the edges but I met some of them at Open House there before and they were just really excited to be part of our school and it was really exciting to help them. Unfortunately, through some quirk of scheduling, we were 30% Special Ed and we had one solitary Special Ed Coordinator. Aside from compliance issues, I never taught such a high-needs group before but I had the Math for America network and the optimism and energy of a first-year teacher so I wasn’t that worried at the time.
Things got a little tricky early on because my principal’s philosophy for discipline was build relationships, and we couldn’t build relationships fast enough. You all know. Then one Friday in mid-October, a student was hit by a car. He's okay, but in the ensuing emotional turmoil, one student blamed another student and that first student attacked the second student and in the process hit one of our teachers and gave her neck problems for three months. Then the principal didn’t want to suspend the student that did the attacking, and then all of the staff started going to mandatory weekly happy hours that we called ‘getting coffee’.
I drank a lot of coffee that year. I also started to flounder. These lessons that I had worked really, really well in student teaching like, “Imagine a function as a vending machine.” Bombing. The kids were not invested. They weren’t learning. They were making a ruckus.
My principal made it very clear that she was not happy with how I was doing. She would come in and she had a very specific timing that I should use and would literally pull out her phone in the middle of class and start timing me and let me know every second that I was over. I had to create a sense of urgency. And when I asked what that meant, it involved carrying a clipboard around. Four years later I’m still not sure what that means.
She would share lessons from her two-and-a-half years in a math class and then when I would use one of them for when I knew she was coming to visit, she would go, “Why would anyone use this activity? It didn’t make any sense.”
I started to get panic attacks when she would come to visit. I can remember just feeling short of breath as soon as she walked in with her little notebook. And I respectfully said that I felt we were starting to develop different philosophies for how students learned.
And she said, and this is a direct quote, “You are a first-year teacher. You do not know better than me. Do what you're told.”
I appreciate the ‘Boo”. The night before my formal observation, I wanted so badly to convince her that I was doing good and that she was wrong and that I could do this so I spent an hour-and-a-half on the phone with my MFA advisor just working through exactly what I would say and exactly what I would do and exactly what the lesson would look like. Finally I got his seal of approval.
Went in the next morning, in comes my principal with someone from the superintendency that I had never met. She then proceeds to speak loudly during the lesson about how bad the lesson was, how could I ever think that activity was great, and what was I thinking. This was around the time I started to develop a little bald spot on my chin. It was a gray spot but the kids all thought it was a bald spot and enjoyed pointing that out in the middle of quadratics lessons when I’m trying to teach factoring.
After that, after I was graded ineffective across the board. I was assigned a teacher development plan. I had to write a four-page scripted lesson plan after meeting with the other math teacher in the school every single day while in addition to making worksheets and slides and teaching literacy and doing advisory and all the other things you do at a first-year school.
I would stay at school until 6:00 p.m. when school safety would kick me out because the building closed. Take an hour subway ride home back to Brooklyn, sit on my couch until ten or eleven o’clock at night, go to sleep. Wake up the next morning and rush back to Harlem hoping that the copiers worked that day so I could actually teach something.
After a few weeks of this Teacher Development Plan, when I wasn’t showing the improvement that I was supposed to, my principal pulls me aside and says, “You know, you're not getting it. I don't know what else to say to you. This school just isn’t a good match. You should look for another job next year.”
Mind you, this was in the hallway during ninth period. And I just kind of stood there because is she being serious right now? Does she not see how much work I’m putting in? Why doesn’t she cut me some slack for just being a first-year teacher not knowing what I’m doing? Why is she being so unkind to me when the same things are happening in other teachers’ classes? Why is she picking on me? Why is she scowling at me right now? Why did she pick this awful mustard color for the lockers? Why are there so many kids going to the bathroom right now? Why can’t I not stop crying?
What do I do? This is what I thought I was going to do for the rest of my life and, apparently, I’m terrible at it. So what do I do now? Because I’m thirty. Should I not be in the classroom with children? Like should I just not be alone? Student teaching wasn’t as bad. Was everyone just lying to me when I was doing that and telling me that I had good instincts? Why didn’t I listen to any of my friends when they told me a first-year principal at first-year school was not good for a first-year teacher?
I used to sell computers and I was terrible at that and I’m terrible at this. Am I just terrible at literally everything I try? Do I even find a job next year? Is anyone even going to hire me after this? What if she goes after my license? Do I have to move back to Maryland? What do I tell Math for America? Do I have to pay back my master’s? What do I do? I thought this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life.
After telling me to, “Toughen up”, another direct quote, my principal left and I went back to my desk to try to plan.
At the end of that day, some kids came up and wanted to see if I was okay. I remember one student, Karim, said, “Mister, she fire you?” He's one of my top students. He was really great. Loved math.
And I said, “No, of course not. I’m just in a little bit of trouble. It’s fine.” How else do you tell a kid you just spent a year building a relationship with that you're not going to be there next year? So then I helped him with his homework because that’s the job, and he looked relieved that I was going to be around. Which told me that maybe everything I thought I was doing wasn’t just in my head. That maybe I was making a difference.
At happy hour, sorry, coffee that week, the other teachers who had more experience were aghast at what was happening. They couldn’t believe any of the events from the past week or the year. I texted my MFA mentors and advisor and was like, “What am I doing wrong?”
They're like, “Not much. You're a first-year teacher. You're doing great. You have good instincts.”
My friends at other schools, my MFA cohort that I went through master’s school with, they couldn’t believe the stories I was telling them, and they still tell stories about that year, they were trying to find me jobs at their schools. I remember, eventually, I got a job offer from my current school and I was in the parking lot of the DMV and I just started hollering like a crazy person and pounding the steering wheel, specifically because it was evidence that I wasn’t a crazy person. That maybe I did have a future doing this. I could do this for the rest of my life.
Another piece of evidence that I wasn’t crazy was that we had 100% staff turnover at the end of that first year. Yup.
It’s four years later. I’m finishing up my fifth year teaching and things are good. I’m still at the same school. I get to work with amazing kids that spend an-hour-and-a-half making me a birthday graph on decimals.
The white spot went away. I get to work with some amazing people, some of whom are here tonight, and I feel like I’m starting to earn people’s respect and it’s amazing. Things got better.
And that first year made me realize two very important things. First, that it’s a travesty that there are teachers, amazing first-year teachers all over the place that are burning out after their first year because there are principals and schools that are bad. They are amazing and we need them, because I need to learn from them and steal from them and they're burning out. This job is hard and exhausting but it shouldn’t be soul crushing.
And I just want to tell those people that it gets better, as cliché as that is. It really does.
And the second thing I realized is that teaching is a team sport. None of us can do this alone. You need to find yourself an administrator that understands. You need to find yourself a department that will go out to dinner with you and laugh at jokes.
You need to find yourself a community of educators, like Math for America or my online teaching community who I can reach out to and say, “I’m teaching exponentials tomorrow and I have no idea what that looks like.” And they give you thirty responses in thirty minutes.
You need to find a group of people who you can say, “I just had the worst lesson of my life,” and they will just say, “Yup. Been there. That sucks.” And they'll listen and they’ll help.
And we need more teachers because, like I said, I need to steal from you because I need to look good. Thank you.
Hear Matt’s story on Soundcloud.