#TeacherLife

The season 2 finale highlights the voices of educators who have participated in the #RedforEd movement. In this episode, four teachers come on the show to share their experiences in both the Denver strike and Indiana rally, providing insight into the events leading up to the movement, their personal reasons for participating, and what they hope to change in education.

For our last full interview of season 2, we’re joined by Emerald Barton, a kindergarten teacher from Florida. She’s the creator of the Kindergarten Chronicles, a Facebook page that has over 70,000 followers, and she’s most known for her famous Gluestick Pledge. In this episode, Emerald shares how the Kindergarten Chronicles came about, some of the challenges she has encountered as a content creator, and how she keeps herself uplifted and joyful for both her students and followers.

Alice McCartney, a former high school French teacher, shares her struggles with her loss of identity as a teacher, the parallels between teaching and parenthood, her conflicted emotions surrounding a return to the classroom, and how the current issues regarding school safety and gun violence have played an impact in this decision.

In this episode, I interview with Kathy Ngo Martin, a high school special education math teacher. As we sat down in front of a massive spread of pizza, cheese, crackers, and (maybe) some wine, we talked for hours, touching on the damaging emphasis schools have on college, microaggressions that we both experienced as Asian Americans, and her side hustle, Pre-Algebra Teachers - an online community and resource for math teachers.

In this episode, Chris Moore, a school psychologist from Oregon, shares his perspective on how to best support teacher sustainability, address the whole child through social emotional learning, and show compassion to yourself and others by shifting your mindset on success and failure.

In this episode, Sandy Armstad, a retired teacher from rural Montana, shares the joys and challenges she found in teaching, how she worked five jobs to support her three children, and tells us what she really thinks thinks of all the fancy, new acronyms that keep surfacing in education.

Stacey is a music teacher, entrepreneur, podcaster, and founder of Side Hustle Teachers. On this episode, she discusses how, despite becoming a teacher has been her life-long dream since she was only 9 years old, having a side hustle ultimately made balancing work and family possible.

On the premiere of Season 2, an anonymous teacher breaks the silence and shares her experiences and opinions on teaching black students in a predominantly white administration, as well as her school's reaction when she opened up about having bipolar disorder.

In the final episode of season 1, I sit down with three teachers - Rachel, Claire, and Shannon. They’ve all just completed their first year of teaching and are eager to reflect on what they’ve taken from the year. For all of them, there were many unexpected challenges, struggles with detaching from work, but most importantly, some incredibly joys that they experienced during their year.

In this episode, Ashley from NY shares why she thinks personal/professional boundaries are necessary, how she started working towards sustainability in her career, how she manages her anxiety as a teacher, and the cringe-worthy way she discovered the true definition of “netflix & chill”.

Music is "Waiting" by Crowander