Does the Internet even still belong to Beyonce? (Sit down, Elon.) I’m Mel, the founder of A Mann’s World, an education policy blog. I thought in this first post I would speak a bit on why I decided to start this blog.
I have wanted to be a teacher ever since I can remember moving past the astronaut and mermaid stage. When I was in kindergarten, I wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, when I was in first grade, I wanted to be a first grade teacher, and so on. I wanted to be a source of support for students as my teachers had been for me. I joined chorus my junior year of high school and decided that was the subject I most wanted to teach.
When I began college, I thought I wanted to teach high school. I remember specifically saying, “It takes a special kind of person to teach middle school, and that person just isn’t me.” During my senior year of college, I ate those words. My first student teaching placement was in a middle school with an absolutely incredible cooperating teacher. I fell in love with the wacky personalities of those middle schoolers. I was excited at the idea of teaching the rudiments of solfège and the fundamentals of counting rhythms.
Despite my college experiences and passion for teaching, I struggled as a first-year teacher, as many of us do. I took a position at a middle school where I taught chorus and general music. I discovered the vital skills that my college preparation program had not deemed important enough to include in its curriculum. Classroom management, seating charts, curriculum night, IEP/504 implementation, calling caregivers, fundraising, recruiting, as well as the extra responsibilities that have absolutely nothing to do with teaching your assigned subject–I drowned. My principal and assistant principals also had no idea how to help me, and our relationship grew increasingly resentful. I found myself wondering when the last time was that any of my college professors and current administrators had taught in a public school classroom.
Nevertheless, I slowly improved my craft. I read books (shoutout to Harry and Rosemary Wong, authors of The First Days of School and The Classroom Management Book). I asked for advice from veteran teachers. By spring of my fourth year of teaching, I felt like a professional. Unfortunately, that was March of 2020, and we all know what happened then.
We finished that school year virtually. In July I accepted a middle school position in Maryland that was essentially my dream job. I said an asynchronous goodbye to my upcoming students, and I moved. That fall, I greeted a new school community entirely through Zoom and Canvas. I worked with counselors to get as many students in their online classes as possible, and I hosted countless video chat lunch bunches and after school club meetings. Some of those kids told me about arguments at home, some described a desire to self-harm, some came out to me, some informed me they were being abused, some talked about their Animal Crossing island, and everything in between. I spent most afternoons and evenings sitting on my couch planning, crying or dissociating.
In spring of 2021, my school went hybrid, eventually phasing all students into being physically at school full-time. At that point, that was the hardest teaching had ever been for me. Students struggled to care and to hold their attention, and they often got into altercations. Their caregivers seemed unable to help redirect or provide logical consequences at home. Still, our staff did our best to support each other and our students. We were hopeful that the following year would improve.
Unfortunately, the fall of 2021 was one of the most difficult time periods of teaching I have ever experienced. Even now I find it challenging to accurately describe. I was often getting to the school at 6:30 am, working there until 5 or 6 pm, and then going home and working there until 10 or 11 pm. Student attention and behaviors had somehow worsened. Rather than using our planning time to assess the previous lesson and plan for the next one, our staff was using planning and lunch periods to host detentions, provide office hours, completely rewrite curriculum to meet student understanding, and attempt to differentiate lessons for a classroom of students at thirty wildly different levels of content mastery. Students and staff could be absent for weeks at a time due to coronavirus exposure or infection.
Despite my extreme feelings of depression and hopelessness that year, I really began to question our education system structure. Our students with marginalized identities had the most apathy and the least support at home. The newest teachers had the most trouble managing their classroom. Our district was one of the richest in Maryland, yet the classrooms would leak during storms or become unbearably hot or cold. Students from high-poverty families had the most intense learning disabilities. Every outcome just felt so predictable.
Of course, that predictability is in fact the direct result of systemic inequality. As I became more curious (read: infuriated), I enrolled in a graduate program for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University. I resolved to continue teaching until I earned my master’s degree. I would then search for a job where I could help teachers and students. This plan went somewhat awry in January of 2023, when my mental health became so poor that I had to leave my teaching position quite suddenly. That was without a doubt one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make.
Since then, I have graduated with a Master’s Degree in Education Policy and continued to become frustrated with the quality of education in the United States. Not to be overly dramatic, but I believe that improving our public education system is the key to solving so many of the nation’s most pressing issues.
That brings us to today–I started A Mann’s World with the goal of providing myself and others a space to learn about important education policy topics and discuss problems and solutions. It is named for Horace Mann, an education reformer and slavery abolitionist of the 1800s who is now also known as “the father of American education.” Education policy is affected by and has an effect on so many pieces of our lives. It is my hope that by continuing to draw attention to this topic, we can put pressure on policymakers to make decisions that prioritize student and teacher experiences over profit.
After all, what could be more important than our children and their future?