My Career Began on a Zoom Screen 5 Years Ago. I Still Fell in Love With Teaching.

Originally published in Education Week on June 19, 2025

At the end of my first year of teaching, I wrote a piece for Education Week about that experience. This week, a follow-up piece came out where I wrote about how despite the challenges of the past five years of my career, I’ve fallen in love with teaching. In the years between these essays, I’ve been so incredibly lucky to be able to write about the work and have people read it and I don’t take it for granted at all. I wanted to say thank you to you for reading this sentence and for reading any and all other sentences you’ve read by my as I try my best to write about what (I think) this all means.

The last five years in education have been hard. Exacerbating these challenges has been a public discourse filled with daily declarations on all that is wrong with education—often with good reason. The front pages and political stages have been full of poor reading scores, troubling trends in student mental health, and continued learning loss.

But as all of this has gone on, I remained committed to teaching. I owe this commitment in no small part to the resilience I have seen from students, families, and other educators who inspired me to keep going on my hardest days. I think of my student who learned to speak and then read in English months after arriving in the United States. I think of the father of one of my students, who cried sharing how he wanted his son to have a kinder upbringing than his own. I think of my mentor who, decades into her career, would still stay for hours after school to work with students to practice what they hadn’t yet mastered in class.

The rest is over here: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-my-career-began-on-a-zoom-screen-5-years-ago-i-still-fell-in-love-with-teaching/2025/06. And more to come, I’m sure <3.