UTEC Bio
Year: Sophomore
Cohort: 2028
Credential: Single Subject Math
Major: Math
Program: 4+1 Dual Degree
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Interview
Question: What inspired you to become a teacher?
Janae: I have many siblings, but two of them in particular have had very interesting experiences in the education system. My older brother had ADHD growing up, and I feel they always just pushed him off as a problem child instead of addressing the educational issues. And then my younger brother has Down’s Syndrome, so watching him grow and learn has really changed my life. Then, when I was in high school, I had a math teacher with whom I became the best of friends after I left her class. I would always visit her classroom during my free periods. Every time she was teaching, I kind of naturally stepped in and helped the kids. It’s interesting, because throughout high school, I thought I was going to go to med school for a really long time. I applied to half of my colleges as a biomedical engineering major, because I really thought I was going to med school. Then in my senior year, I had much more free time, so I was in her math class a lot more. And that’s when I thought, okay, I really like to teach. I also have done a lot of tutoring stuff. I tutored little cousins, my niece and my nephew, and my younger brother.
Question: So you now feel teaching is what makes you happy?
Janae: I do. I’m good at science stuff, but I don’t think I would wake up in the morning and be excited to go to work.
Question: You participated in the Breakthrough program this summer in Philadelphia. Tell me about that experience.
Janae: It was an amazing, enlightening experience. I first heard of Breakthrough in San Francisco, but when it took me to the website to apply, I noticed that it was offered across the country. I thought, this is such a great opportunity. I wanted to venture out. So I applied for Philadelphia, New York and the Twin Cities. I got the email “We want to interview you” for Philadelphia. Which was my first choice. I had to do a mock lesson and have mock students sit in. I used my mom as my student. I also had to submit a 3- to 5-minute video of me teaching something, like a rhyme or a riddle to help teach children what you were currently teaching. So I had to come up with a song and stuff. I did that, submitted it, and then I found out in January or February that I would be in Philadelphia. I was over the moon. I was so excited. I lived in Temple University, all for free; housing was free. We also got food stipends and public transportation was also free.
On my first day I was nervous. How it works is, you have two weeks of orientation and training before the kids even get there. So you’re bonding with your coworkers and learning. I was nervous for that because I’ve never been an independent teacher. I’ve always been maybe a tutor or just watching a classroom, but I’ve never had a classroom of my own. But I think Breakthrough did a really good job of preparing me.
We were in middle school. Middle schoolers are a lot, they’re preteens and teens. It can get crazy so we were prepared for that. Monday is not going to be like a Tuesday. And then this Tuesday is not going to be like next Tuesday. So it was a lot to prepare for.
In my third week, the kids got there and the first thing I noticed was there was a very welcoming presence there from the very first day. The teaching fellows lined up outside and it was a cheer line to invite the students in. I think we had over 200 students. The program was so large that they grew, I think, 80 to 100 new students from last summer to this past summer. We welcomed every single one of them in with a little dance line that we had. So it was really welcoming experience off the bat.
Then I met my students. We had homeroom classes, it’s like a selective learning crew. It’s your own homeroom and you have a co-teacher. So it was me and somebody else. You teach your homeroom and then the homeroom next to it. We had a whole set schedule, depending on the subject that you teach. You have two actual teaching periods, and then you have a planning period, and then you have a period to meet with your department, and then you have a period for an elective. You had to run your own electives. Mine was poetry. I got to run poetry with another one of my teaching fellows.
We had lunch and stuff—it was a whole middle school day. We had to get there between 7:30 to 8:00 am. And then we stayed an hour after the kids left. So our day was from 7:30-ish to four or five pm. At first it was tiring; you had to get used to that schedule. But after a week or so, you got used to it. You think, all right, I’m up and ready for work. I really, really loved my experience. I taught eighth grade science, which originally didn’t excite me. I was excited in general, but it wasn’t what I thought I was going to be teaching. I thought I was going to be teaching math. But I got there and loved it. So now I want to get a science credential as well as a math credential.
Breakthrough was such a transformative experience for me. It was emotional too because I didn’t even know I wanted to work with middle schoolers before the summertime, and now I’m in love with the middle school environment. I think middle schoolers really match my personality. In elementary school, they’re still kind of young, so it needs a little bit more discipline. And then in high school they’re kind of too cool for school now. But middle school is the perfect spot.
We also had something called ASM, which is an all school meeting. We had it every single day. We had chants with the kids, we played games and gave out a bag of chips. Every day, every homeroom chose one student that stood out and we gave them a bag of chips in front of everyone. It was such a great environment for students to be cheered and rewarded. It felt like a family, honestly.
Question: Did you have mentor teachers who were very experienced, who got you through the orientation but also were there for you as you were leading your own classrooms?
Janae: Yes. There was a dean of students and a dean of teachers. We would go to them with our immediate questions. Then we also had instructional coaches and they were for each subject, like if you had any science questions or wanted to make an experiment and didn’t know what to do or bring. You would go straight to your instructional coach. There was a lot of support around you all the time. I personally connected with an instructional coach that wasn’t even my subject. She was a history teacher, but we got really close. We also had an instructional coach specifically for classroom management. That was really cool. So if you had issues, maybe not science-related, but just behavioral issues, we had an instructional coach for that. It was a lot of support that you could use.
We also had two deans of students. One dean was for students’ personal needs and academics and one dean was for discipline, I guess you can say, even though they had the same type of job, they kind of split it down the middle. So if you had behavioral issues, we could ask the dean of students to come sit in our classroom to help us with behavior. There were just so many aspects where you never felt alone. Even with fellow teachers, you could combine classes in one week. I combined with eighth and ninth grade science because they were so closely related, and we did the water cycle together. We made lava lamps, we had a lava lamp experiment. They used Alka-Seltzer tabs, water, oil and food coloring. And they made their own lamps with the flashlights and stuff. It was a great thing.
Question: Where did the students come from? Was it summer school for them?
Janae: It’s a program that they apply to for enrichment. It’s a bridge between their past and future grades. For example, if I was teaching eighth grade, the students had just left seventh grade and are going into eighth grade. Some students did not want to be there at first. But then as the program goes on, it’s inevitable that you’re going to build your family there. So after a while, basically all the students were excited to come every day, which was really good.
Question: How many weeks was the program?
Janae: It was six weeks, but I stayed in Philadelphia for a total of nine, including two instructional weeks, and then six weeks of actual teaching, and then one week of wrapping up. The program is such good preparation for teaching, because even though it’s only a six week program, it focused on what teaching really is. We had to do lesson plans every week and teach actual lessons. We had a curriculum to follow. The good thing about it was we had a general curriculum, but if you felt like the students maybe don’t need to learn one thing as much as another, we had room to tweak it. So we had a whole curriculum, we had lesson plans due to our instructional coach. Every week we would have check-in meetings to hold ourselves accountable. We would reflect on our improvement in teaching, from the beginning of the summer to the end of the summer. I really feel like Breakthrough prepared me for undergraduate fieldwork. A lot of my peers were a little nervous about fieldwork, but I was ready. I just went straight into it and was super excited.
Question: When you have your own class someday, what are some of your passions and priorities? What do you want students to get from your classes?
Janae: One thing that really stood out to me this summer was I realized I like a student-centered classroom. I don’t like to lecture long because, especially with middle school students, it’s just a whole bunch of words. Instead they need to see it for a few minutes and just get straight into it and ask questions. I like a hands-off approach, so I’m kind of teaching from the back. The students can feel like it’s their classroom and I’m really just there for assistance, which I really enjoy. I feel like my students learn better that way because instead of telling them what something is, I use a lot of problem-solving skills and tools. That way they learn experientially and come to conclusions themselves. They have hands-on experience. We did a lot of genetics and Punnett Squares. Let’s say we’re testing for eye color of an offspring. So your dad has one color eye, which could be capital B, which is the genotype. And then I have brown eyes which is a lowercase b. In a Punnett square, you put those together in each box to give the probability of that trait in the offspring. But instead of telling the students exactly what I told you, I gave a general definition of a phenotype, which is the physical trait. So the color of the eyes and then a genotype would be the actual letter trait. I showed them the box and let them put together how to do it. And everybody got it. I didn’t have to sit there and break it down. I think a lot of teachers don’t give their students enough credit when it comes to problem-solving. It’s a critical skill, and I like to teach problem-solving and experiential lessons. I don’t lecture for long at all. My students learn much more than if it was just lecturing and having them write and write.
To answer your second question, I also want my students to feel comfortable in the space that they’re learning in. So every day, even in the fifth week when I knew my students pretty well, I still had activities to get to know them or have things they could connect to themselves. I’d ask, what’s your favorite trait about you? And do you think you get it from your mom or your dad? I connected everything they learned to themselves. Another important thing I would like for my students to get out of my classroom is how to be a young adult. I think when teaching students, science is super important and I really hope that they get it. But in general, teachers are really there to help you navigate what it is to be a student or what it is to be in the real world, especially for middle schoolers.
It makes me so emotional because my students all wrote me notes on their post-tests. A lot of my students were like, before I got here, I didn’t have much confidence. And through your class, you taught me to speak up and have confidence in myself. One of my students said, you’re just a great teacher, and it’s in your DNA. That really stuck with me.
Question: What do you like to do outside of teaching? Do you have hobbies?
Janae: I love to read. Books are definitely my thing and my escape, even though I love math. I really like expression. So I read my book outside at Golden Gate Park or I’ll take my book to the parks and grasses that we have on campus. I like to go to Welsh field. I also really like to sing. I’m in ASUSF voices, both jazz and general voice. I also write poetry.
