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Hello, hello, hello, everybody, and welcome to the Virtually Fabulous Teacher. I'm Anna, your host, and one of many virtually fabulous teachers out there. I'm so excited to be here with y'all and can't wait to get started. Now I'm new to podcasting, and when I started tossing the idea around in my head of starting a podcast, I wondered what kinds of things new teachers and even veteran ones may find helpful because I've been teaching for 22 years. What have I learned over the course of that time that might be helpful? And what are some things that I might have found helpful along the way? Now, college andor grad school, they'll give you the foundations and the principles of education, pedagogy, theories of learning, curriculum, instruction, assessment, all those big ideas in education theory and practice. You'll sit through mind-numbing professional development sessions throughout the course of your career. Usually when you're sitting there thinking, I should really be in my classroom getting ready for the kids tomorrow. But these sessions will be on instruction models, assessment strategies, new programs, curriculum, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's not what y'all need from me. There are tons of things, however, that I have learned through 22 years of my own experience as well as that of my colleagues and friends. And I've also learned invaluable lessons from the kids and parents and families that I've worked with over the years. And that's those are the things that I would like to share with you guys. Those are also the things that I want to know from y'all, because I certainly don't know everything far from it. Now, we all know that the American public education system is at best deeply flawed and at worst broken. This isn't a podcast on how to change the face of American public education. That's above my pay grade. That's not what we're trying to do here. This is information that I've learned and accumulated over a thousand years of teaching on how to survive and sometimes thrive within the current system. Hopefully, this is stuff that you can take and use in your own classrooms. If you're having a bad day, maybe you'll hear something that'll give you just a little bit of hope and enough to send you back the next day because you know your kids need you. Now, I believe personally that teaching is a calling. Not everyone that go goes into teaching has a calling, I don't think. Um, and not everybody believes that it's a calling. Um there are as many reasons for going into the profession as there are people within it, and they go into it for a whole host of reasons. It's a schedule that works well with having kids. They get the summers off, they believe it's easy, they want to work with kids, they want to change the world, any number of reasons. And the fact is that the teaching profession, as well as the people in it, uh, is complex, it's beautiful, it's messy, it's chaotic. And so are the motivations for going into it, as well as for staying in it, whether you're in it for a year or 10 or 40. And when we walk out of school with our freshly minted teaching degree in our hands, we think it's going to resemble a Pinterest board. Every lesson plan is going to go precisely as written. All of your lessons will be full of those aha and light bulb moments that we hear so much about in professional development and even going through school to some extent. Now, some of that'll be true. Um, the kids will make you laugh, cry, scream. They'll make you want to tear your hair out, want to hug them, take them home, and love them. And there are also days that you'll feel like drop kicking them out the window and that nothing you ever do is enough. You'll feel like you've done everything but send up smoke signals and do an interpretive dance to get a concept through. And it still seems that nothing is working. You'll go home and you'll drink all the wine. You will leave on a Friday afternoon and you will swear that you'll never come back. But then come Monday morning, you'll be back in your classroom smiling and greeting your kids because you know that they need you. Now, just to give you some information on my background, um, as I mentioned earlier, I've been teaching for 22 years. Nine of those have been in the brick and mortar classroom. Um, the last 13 I've been online. And 16 of those years have been in special education, primarily working with students that have uh severe emotional behavior disorders. And the funny thing is, I kind of fell into special education. It was not even on my radar. And actually, my bachelor's degree uh was in psychology. And I when I first got out of college, the first job I was able to get was as working as an at a nonprofit organization in Atlanta, um, doing meeting planning and you know, just communications kind of stuff. And then I got laid off. Now, I had already known uh at that time that I wanted to get into the teaching profession. So I was already in grad school to get my master's uh in teaching. Um, but at the time that I was laid off, yes, I was in school, but I still had a mortgage and a car payment. So I had to find a job. And so I started applying to schools uh around me. And actually the the very first callback that I got was it was at a separate school. It was at a uh school, it was a separate program in the county that I was in. Now at this point, remember, I didn't know any of the terms separate program, you know, IEP special, I didn't know all of that stuff. But this was a school just for students within the county whose behavior was so severe they could not be even in self-contained classrooms within their own school. So they came to this separate school within the county. And so I got a job as a paraprofessional or para pro in a classroom working with students that had uh autism. They were all nonverbal, and they also had um SEBD or severe emotional behavior disorders. Now, special education, like I said, wasn't even on my radar at this point. At this point, SPED was a topic that I was gonna take, just a basic survey course, um, like an overview as part of my grad school program. That was gonna be it. I was then gonna go into an elementary school, a regular classroom, and that was gonna be the course of my career. But this being in this classroom changed all of that. And just to give you an idea of what I was getting into, my mom worked in the county at the time, and and I was offered the job, and I called her and told her that I got the job and where it was, and she said, Do what now? Um, she she knew more about this program uh than I did. She was a little bit nervous about me going into it. And so obviously, when I first got there, I had no idea what to expect. And I went to a public school throughout my own school career, but nothing in my training or experience prepared me for what this program was all about. Um, so off I went. Um, the students were nonverbal, they were very physically aggressive. I had to be um restraint trained. Um, and that was that was an and that was an eye-opening experience as well. Um, and so that's kind of how my first year went. But after after that year, I knew that that was what I was supposed to do. Now I was in school and but I had I still had to do student teaching. And I in a public school, I couldn't student teach in my own classroom. Like I mentioned, I had a mortgage, I had a car payment. So I I had to have a job. And fortunately, I was able to find a job as a teacher uh in a private Christian school that where I could teach and student teach in my own classroom. And so that I loved that experience that I enjoyed it, but I learned those kids didn't need me. It was, and that's not to say that they didn't need good teachers because they do, every kid needs good teachers, but these kids didn't need me. So as much as I love that experience, I knew I needed to go back to the school that I had come from. Um, and the kids with autism that I had worked with before, they were high school age. And that wasn't the age group that I wanted to work with. So when I went back to the school as a teacher, I had worked on the elementary side of the program. So um, and that's where I stayed for seven years, and then um I had the opportunity in 2013 to work online, and my son was very young at the time. I said, this is an opportunity that I really need to take. And it really did. I did take a pay cut um because the school I was working for, and I think a lot of you guys that teach online find this to be the case, they don't pay you for the years of experience you have or the degree that you the level of degree that you have. It's a flat rate, and that's what you're paid. Um, and so that that was that was less than ideal, but it created a really good situation for my family, and it worked for us um because I was able to do that throughout my son's school career. He's he's almost 18 now, so it's it's worked out very well for us. Um and I was able to work in several different schools, public school, private school, Christian school, um, even working online. And I've been able to work with kids all over the world, which is the coolest thing ever. I love that. Um and so I have a lot of a lot of different experience um through that I've accumulated throughout my career. Now, hopefully the things that y'all will get from this podcast are they're things you won't find in a textbook or in a professional development workshop. Um these are the unwritten rules, the lessons that I've learned in, you know, a thousand years of teaching, uh, elementary special education. And some of it will be funny, some of it's heartbreaking, some of it's uplifting, but I hope all of it will be relevant. And I don't want it just to be a one-way thing. I want to hear the things y'all've learned in your journeys as well. I want to hear your funny stories, your heartbreaking stories, things that you have found that work either in person or online, whatever that you want to share. I want this to be a safe space for educators, parents, anybody to come and share information and find encouragement if that's what you need with people that really do understand what you're going through. And I I actually started in a new school uh last year, and I am the virtual teacher, the school is in another state, and there was a person in the classroom, all the kids were in are in what located in one room. So that was a new experience for me. And so when I there's a person that's in the classroom, she was the teaching assistant. And so we talked on the phone before I started, and I told her that I'd be happy to answer, you know, any questions that she had, anything like that, because she's uh in school to get her teaching degree, her certification. And the first question she asked me was, and really the only question she asked me was, how have you lasted as long as you have? Because I don't think it's any secret that people are leaving the profession in droves. Um, and and the only thing I could tell her was it's just it's for the kids. I know the kids need me, and I know the kids need good teachers. So that was it. That's it for me. Um now this has been kind of a very rambling sort of stream of consciousness kind of thing. I just wanted to introduce myself to you guys. Um, and thank you so much for joining me. I hope that you'll get something out of this. Um, there will be new episodes coming out on Tuesday. Uh, next week is going to be about starting the school year off strong since that's what we're getting ready to do. So I hope that this has been helpful for you guys, and hopefully, I'll see you all next week. Bye.