Where Hannah Writes

August 2021 marked the beginning of my ninth school year as a high school teacher, but this August felt different than previous Augusts. Usually, by the time August rolls around, I start to feel ready for school to start. I have new ideas that I want to try out. I get excited to meet my students. I plan the first few weeks of class and include new lessons that I think will be relevant and engaging. But not this year. This year, August hit, but the inspiration did not. I looked forward to the first week of school like I look forward to getting a root canal. I stepped into my classroom a few days before the first day of school, and I still felt drained from the Zoom classes that defined the school year that ended a few short months earlier. I wasn't done recovering yet. There were some beautiful moments during the 2020-2021 school year, and I am very grateful for the way our district leadership navigated, but the exhaustion of teaching through 2020 and 2021 was unlike any other exhau...

Today is Monday. I wake up and take a mere 14 minutes to get out of bed. After a quick shower, I put on my work pants (they're actually pajama pants with alpacas on them, but I wear them for work) with a nice sweater that does not in any way match with my work pants. But no one else knows that. After making coffee and breakfast, I carefully balance my water bottle and coffee mug in one hand while I hold my breakfast sandwich in the other hand and try not to spill as I climb the stairs to my office, located directly above my bedroom. My first task of the day involves responding to emails from students. Some have questions about grades and others want to know about an assignment that is due this week. A few students have turned in an assignment late, so I grade them and enter them into the grade book. Another student has sent me an email containing an apology that they had missed part of Friday's lesson because they were helping their little sister adjust the microphone on her la...

Teachers across the world are teaching in virutal classrooms and connecting with their students via email, YouTube, Remind, Google Classroom, Zoom, and any other digital platform possible. Originally, I mistakenly thought that remote teaching would give me time to read a book or learn a language. Instead, I am finding that it takes just as much (maybe actually more) time to be a virutal teacher. It has been a juggle of emails and lesson plans and online platforms and grading and zooming and keeping students informed and answering their questions and checking on them and washing my hands. But during these weeks, I have been inspired by my colleagues who are reaching out to their students and creating normacly for them in so many creative ways. I see teachers connectingwith their students every single day on Zoom. I see teachers contacting their students via phone. I see teachers creating opportunities for students to use technology to have class discussions and meaningfully engage with ...

Hispanic Heritage Month begins tomorrow. It lasts from Septemer 15th to October 15th and the Independence Days of Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua all occur during Hispanic Heritage Month. Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming were all part of Mexico prior to 1836 and 1848, and according to the Census Bureau, there are approximately 60 million Hispanic people in the United States. Before it the month begins, I want to address the question that someone may be thinking:  Why isn't there a month for white people? It's not fair that there is a month for African American and Hispanic people and no month for white people. As a child, I remember asking my parents why there isn't a "Kid's Day". I reasoned that "Kid's Day" should be a national holiday, just like Mother's Day and Father's Day. My parents explained to me that every day was "Kid'...

Lazy. Dumb. Trouble. Attitude. She must have been forced to take Spanish. She doesn't want to be here and won't do any work until the last week of the semester when she comes whining for extra credit. I've seen him in the dean's office. I think he lives there. See that look on her face? That's a look that says that she is here to make my life miserable for 55 minutes a day. Thoughts like these ran through my mind when I first met my students back in August. None of these assumptions were positive, all of them were based on external appearance and behavior observed during a 55 minute class period, and none of them were actually true. Ever since that day, my students have been chipping away at these theories, sometimes bit by bit as with a chisel, and sometimes with the mighty power of a backhoe tractor. The guys that I thought would cause trouble? They are kind, ready to help, willing to participate, and eager to learn Spanish. The girls that I as...

Originally published by Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center  on May 24, 2018. After pushing a resource cart around for over two years, this spring I was elated to welcome my students to my very own classroom. I no longer had to fill my backpack with papers to haul from class to class, wrangle a cart through crowded hallways or speed walk back to the office to fetch forgotten materials.  My classroom is brand new and is located at the very end of a long hallway, far from the rest of the world language department and almost everything else in the school. In fact, when the science department created a scaled model of our solar system within the building, Pluto was right outside my new classroom door.  I spent an afternoon eagerly arranging desks and hanging posters, maps, flags and student work on the walls. I filled my cabinet with supplies and made a welcome slide to project onto the screen at the beginning of class on the first day in o...