I sat this morning with tears as I attended a ceremony for the inaugural Early College Academy (ECA) class at Trinity Washington University. I felt like a proud mom as I watched these wonderful young people get honored for their accomplishments.
ECA is a partnership between Trinity and Coolidge High School in DC. Students enrolled in the program take college and high school courses and when they graduate, they will do so with both a high school diploma from DC Public Schools AND an Associate’s degree from Trinity.
Teaching can be a lonely, thankless job. Never more so than during the recent pandemic. Any teacher who lived through this will tell you how hard it was to manage the rapid switch to online courses, often with very little training and then teaching from our homes to black boxes on zoom. Even when we returned face-to-face the culture had shifted. Students had become accustomed to being online. They often operated as though they were still there. Instead of black boxes on zoom they were now largely silent, masked faces. I have loved teaching for over 20 years, but the pandemic and its aftermath left me questioning sometimes whether I had made the right career choice.
It was with this disillusionment that I walked into the first of 2 sections of Introductory Psychology that I was teaching in Spring 2022. This time though the students staring back at me were different. I had been asked to teach ECA so these were all high school juniors. There was a spark there that had been lacking in some of my other classes. These students were happy to be there. They soaked in the knowledge, relishing in the opportunity they had been given. We laughed a lot. We talked baseball, and music, and played wordle and hangman and we laughed some more.
It has long been a central tenet of my teaching philosophy that fun and learning are not mutually exclusive. Suddenly I realized that in the post pandemic I had stopped having fun in the classroom. These students gave that back to me.
I am the parent of a son who is the exact same age – a current high school senior. I am a first-generation college student and an immigrant. I saw myself in these kids. I saw my son in these kids. And they wormed their way into my heart.
This morning I watched them from afar. They looked different – they had matured in the past year. They are now young adults, not kids. They have big dreams, hopes and plans for the future. I could not stop myself from beaming with pride. I am so grateful that I got to spend one semester with them on their journeys to whatever greatness awaits them.
