Issue link: http://educator.cta.org/i/48466
dent made a pass at her. Classroom manage- ment was a constant challenge. She taught the way she had been taught — opening a book and reading vocabulary aloud. "Gosh yes, I was boring!" she says. "Without a sense of humor, I couldn't have gotten through it. I didn't know what I was doing." She earned her teaching credential but wasn't sure she would ever set foot in a classroom again. She took a job at UPS. While substitute teaching for extra income, she received a job offer to teach and coach basketball from Rio Linda High School in Sacramento County and accepted. She was assigned a class filled with "behavior problems" that had gone through eight substitute teachers. She operated in "sur- vival mode" and continued the same style of teaching, trying to bond with students. The turning point During her second year, she began attend- ing an after-school workshop series run by the Area 3 Writing Project at UC Davis. It transformed her style of teaching. "I remember thinking, 'Ohhh, now I get it — this is teaching!'" she recalls. "Suddenly I was part of a group of people who were talking about how to make connections with kids and how to teach writing, and what I was hearing rang true for me. It was seren- dipity. I never looked back." She focused on making material rel- evant to her students. "For example, when I introduce them to the book 1984, I no longer start by asking them what they know about George Orwell. I learned that you have to start from where the kids are and help them to find themselves in the mate- rial so they have a voice. I ask them about privacy, whether their parents have the right to look at text messages, and whether the government has the right to go through their car without permission. I ask them how it feels to be racially profiled. I ask them to discuss things they care about and then move forward." Once engaged, students improved their behavior. She found that with higher expectations, students began acting like grown-ups. "I learned how to scaffold curriculum, so I wasn't just getting kids interested in a topic and saying, 'Here, write about this,'" says Nicolls. "I learned how to move them along to increasingly complex tasks so they could build on their skills and apply them in a variety of ways." Her pacing changed, too. "The best thing I learned from the Writ- ing Project is to look at where my students are and let that influence what I am going to teach next. By looking at where they are, I can constantly adjust." She told students there was no excuse for failure, and did something unusual: She put her phone number on the board and told them to call her if they needed help with homework. "I said, 'If you are not willing to take advantage of this resource, shame on you. And if you are sitting around on a Saturday night and prank-call me, appar- ently you need dating advice.' I only got two or three prank calls in my entire career, because my kids understood that I wanted them to succeed and do well." Her confidence grew as a teacher, and her students were showing growth. But she received a pink slip her third year due to budget cuts. "I knew it was coming; I was the person with least seniority," she recalls. "I felt that I was a good teacher, but that I was dispos- able. It was very painful." Emerging stronger She lost her job, but didn't lose her spirit. Fellow Writing Project members who had also received pink slips formed a support group, and several of them became involved in a summer program called Transition to College for the Area 3 Writing Project, where they created curriculum and thematic units of instruction. "I wanted to focus on moving kids beyond valuing material things so they could examine their own sense of what's right and wrong and learn how to make decisions for themselves," says Nicolls. "The thematic unit revolved around short stories, nonfiction and a novel about what to do in certain situations, how to problem-solve, and what kinds of things should really be valued. It was geared toward students tradi- tionally not college bound." November 2011 / www.cta.org 23