I’m watching her wince through her knee injury.
She forces her hips and legs to cooperate while she walks gingerly to the couch. It wasn’t always like this. After graduating from Columbia University with a master’s degree in administration, she went directly to an alternative transfer high school to teach students from ages 15 to 21. She quickly rose from English teacher to assistant principal. In her first year as assistant principal, she would basically run the operations of this school, from programming and professional development to waiting for kids in police custody and in emergency rooms. She reversed attacks on her character and named herself the HBIC of the school.
She never shied away from command and never led her shipmates astray.
In her second year, however, she had other aspirations: her first child and a home for her new family. Under a new principal, she worked tirelessly to cross every t and dot every i. Whatever she didn’t know how to do, she learned on the job. While other adults treated their jobs as a list of compliance measures and commands to hold others responsible for, she understood how the students in her care had been passed over and along too often in their educational careers. Not doing her job was not an option.
Over the next decade or so, she maintained her stellar expectations, work ethic, and energy at the direst times. Her school would end up on lists of all the wrong sorts, her students on the wrong end of the news. She had work to do. She’d rattle off the extensive details of what her instructional focus would look like, how individual students needed one set of credits based on the schools they came from, and the alignment between DOE’s policy shifts compared to her own school’s. With her extensive understanding of pedagogy, she would visit classrooms around the school for about five to ten minutes and had solid assessments on every teacher’s pedagogy and every student’s progress. She’d always say she knew what she was doing, which was a daunting list to be sure, never what her principal did.
Nevertheless, she kept working.
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