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Why is that such a hard question?
Maybe I shouldn't say that.
Hashtag Ladypoints.
Hi, I'm Sarah Solomon.
I'm a high school teacher.
I became a teacher through an alternative certification program.
I wanted to do something that felt like social justice work.
I know I loved working with youth because I had done Rock Camp for Girls, and I had
done workshops with young people before, and I felt like I was good at it.
So I decided with a lot
of hesitation to join Teach for America,
and I wanted to be a teacher so I did it.
You go through this really intensive
summer program for I think six weeks, and then at the end of that training,
you are a teacher.
For me,
social justice activism
and education are inextricably linked.
In my old school, I felt very limited in
the work that I could do. When the students came in to school in the
morning they had to walk through metal detectors.
They would say this to me: they felt criminalized. They felt under attacked.
There's a lot of classism and racism
and sexism that affects the process
of categorizing kids and labeling them,
and so by the time students get to high school,
they know exactly how they're viewed by adults in schools,
and so when you have that kind of negative dynamic, you have kids
who are behaving in ways that prevent them from learning,
and so they don't learn,
and then by the time they get to high school, they're so behind academically.
I ended up doing a lot of activism outside of work.
So I joined NYCoRE. I did workshops.
I went to rallies. I planned rallies, and now that I'm at a new school,
I feel like as a school, we're so committed to social justice and
to empowering young people that it feels like I'm doing
activist work just being a teacher there.
There's a lot of conversations that happen
formally and informally at my school about how to take care
of students and how to educate students who have experienced poverty
or experienced trauma, which many of our students have.
I'm still kind of in shock by how amazing it is.
In order to stay positive about my job, it's really important to have a life-work balance.
Being in a band
is huge for me because I turn my brain off from work
when I'm at band practice in a way that I don't ever do otherwise.
And it's just nice to have another part of my life where I'm being creative and
working with other people, and
it's cool for the students, too, to--you know--
to have teachers who have other interests.
It's so easy to burn out as a teacher. When you go home,
you're not really done with your job because you're either planning,
worried about your advisee,
thinking about your lesson for tomorrow,
grading, going to a meeting.
I think it's just about realizing like if you love the work that you do, and you
want to keep doing it,
you have to find a way for it to be sustainable.
My identity as an activist and
someone who has radical politics and has
*** politics definitely impacts the way that I
think about teaching, and I realize
that it is really important for me to
identify that way and to be visible.
Even just little things like
telling a student, "Maybe you shouldn't assume somone's gender,"
is a tiny little thing but could blow the mind of a teenager who hasn't thought
about it.
Being out at work makes it so that I think *** kids
feel like I am someone that they can come to. Not even just to talk about
sexuality, but
they know that I'm always down to have a philosophical conversation about
race or oppression or music.
For people who aren't sure if
what they're doing is the right thing for them,
it's okay to like do something for a while and then do something else.
I think it's important to be your best self
in whatever you're doing, and if you are over it,
I think staying in it can be really harmful especially if you're a teacher.
If you're a teacher and you don't have your heart in it anymore, it's bad.
You have to find the thing that is going to make you want to work harder,
going to make you feel like you're doing a really good job
or that you want to do a really good job.
I think it's just about trying everything until you find it.
Hey everyone. Thanks for watching this episode of LADYPOINTS, featuring Sarah Solomon,
and please subscribe to our YouTube channel, below.
And don't forget to follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/ladypoints
and on Tumblr at ladypoints.tumblr.com. Thanks for watching!