Lesson Plans:
A Teacher Speaks

They were having an [afterschool] art class next door. It's just a little nugget of happiness in the middle of your day. It's about five of our same students, not some other kids, they gave us all little piggy banks and they gave us all paint, and we all sat and painted together. And laughed—hard.

You know they're going to fight you in class. No one wants to be in class. And when you have a complicated living arrangement and a complicated living environment, it becomes hard. You may get some pushback But when they get to see that you're not just Ms. Ward, guardian of ELA, enforcer of all that is right and good in subject-verb agreement—but actually a person that will help me figure out how much garlic to put in my pasta and help me mix my watercolor paints and tell me that red and white makes pink, my favorite color to paint my pig, you get a whole different dynamic. It just makes it completely different. The building is human. There's no robots happening here; these kids know you're real people. You have human emotions.

Some say charter school teachers should be part of the teachers’ union. You've worked in a union school and here, at the Promise Academy. Do you miss the union's resources?

I'm not the kind of person who needs them. You do your job. You just do your job. The union is for those little in-between, crux moments, 'I have an issue, it didn't play out like I thought it would.' Those issues still come up; you have to be your own advocate. You just have to be someone who knows your worth and who can speak up for yourself.

I think it's an interesting dynamic of this building: There is no union, and you could just lose your job. Things happen; it happens. …It is a corporate environment, and people who work here can't forget that. If you do something your boss finds inappropriate in a corporate environment, you'll get fired. But if you're doing your job and you have all this support, you come in every day, you don't have to feel that fear. And I don't. I'm not concerned about losing my job.

Is your boss the principal or Geoff Canada?

My boss is everybody. Everybody has the right to have a say-so in what I'm doing, and if I'm doing it well or not.

- Helen Zelon