Finding her way as a teacher

By Kathy Cao

Becoming a teacher comes with many challenges and responsibilities. Especially, when you’re a young teacher, it can easily be a habit to treat your students like friends because of the small age gap.

Emily Wells, a teacher at Yerba Buena High School, started out as a young teacher. She had to learn to not cross the line between teacher and students the hard way. Even though she believes that you could easily get lost through the process, as you learn and get older, it will become less challenging.

Growing up, Wells has always dreamt of becoming a teacher. When she was an adolescent she loved going to school and her favorite subject was history.

Wells: “When I was a kid, I always loved school, and I thought that I would be like an elementary school teacher, and then when I got older, like high school age, I would like to babysit little kids and I realize like, I don’t think I could do this, but I still wanted to be a teacher and I don’t know, I wasn’t sure what to do at that point and then when I went to college I started really enjoying my history classes like okay I think this is where I’m going to make this work.”

Although it was always her dream to become a teacher, she had many teachers in the past that influenced her and made her believe that she can also become a teacher, like them.

Wells: “Definitely, a high school history teacher that I had and a college professor that I had. So it was just like their personalities, like they were really good at making history interesting. I loved just listening to their stories and my high school teacher, Mr. Hicks, he was just always happy to see everybody, it was like you walk in his classroom and he’s like “Welcome, let’s do some hard stuff!’ I loved that.”

As she graduated from San Jose State University with a bachelors degree, she automatically knew she was going to become a teacher, so she applied for the credential programs. Her first year of teaching was the most challenging.

Wells: “My first year of teaching was probably the hardest year of my life. I was thrown into three different subjects, so I had to teach three different things every day, which I didn’t have any lesson plans or materials for or anything. I was hired two days before school started. So like no time to prepare and… you know it’s just like every day I was just making sure I could survive the next day, I was planning for the next day. That was so exhausting, it gave me insomnia and just it was horrible.”

However, it was easy for her to connect with her students.

Wells: “That was the easy part. I’ve always enjoyed working with high school-aged students. I find it, I find it fun, they make me laugh and I have a good time the hard part was just all the planning and grading and like for three different subjects that I wasn’t ready for.”

Many people have dreams of becoming a teacher but are introverted. Like Wells herself, she was extremely introverted before she became a teacher. She was shy and kept to herself. When she started teaching, she felt comfortable around her students and this helped her build her confidence in herself. She believes that to become a successful teacher, you need to have confidence in yourself.

Wells: “Confidence, how do I want to phrase it, and being proactive, seeing what can go wrong, and preparing for it ahead of time. I think confidence is number 1, if you can get over being scared to be in front of people that are like the first big hurdle.”

Wells was young when she began teaching, so she couldn’t spot the boundary between students and teacher. Since she was so close in age with her students she began treating them like friends instead of students. She thought in order to change that she had to become stricter.

Wells: “I think in the earlier years, like I was saying, you’re trying to figure out the confidence level thing. I think I was probably just more strict than I realized I needed to be and as I get older, I realize you don’t really need to bring on the discipline, just mellow out, everything’s cool.”

One of the strongest strengths Wells has that definitely had a big impact on relieving the stress on her teaching career is being a thorough planner. By doing this she will be able to rest at home when she’s sick without worrying about the substitute.

Wells: “I am a meticulous planner, I’ve always been, like, an organized person. I probably over planned, but you definitely want to over plan, rather than under plan. Right now I’m about a month ahead, it doesn’t always work out according to plan but I like to have those plans like I was sick for a whole week, and I didn’t have to worry about it because I could tell the sub what to do.”

Wells taught at other high schools before moving to Yerba Buena High School. At her other schools she felt disrespected by both her students and their parents. She felt like they blamed her for their students failing to turn in work and said it was because she was a new teacher. When she moved to Yerba Buena high school she fell in love with the school and the environment she teaches in.

Wells: “Because I absolutely love our student population here. I feel respected by the students; I feel respected by their parents. Parent conferences here, the parents are always like ‘how can we work together to help my son or daughter or what does my son need to do?’ I feel like they respect our profession as teachers here much more than I’ve seen in other districts. I just love being here every day and seeing my students walk in the door and smiling at me.”

Through hardship and struggles, Emily Wells has finally achieved her goal in becoming a “successful teacher”.