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I’ve been a teacher for eight years and have worked in two high-poverty public schools. At the first, in South Carolina, I never had enough novels to allow my kids to take them home and read them. We had to read everything in class. At my current school in Chicago, not only do kids get to take their novels home, they get to keep them. This means they can write in them, engaging with the text in more beneficial ways. Each year, I have the opportunity to adjust the curriculum based on the needs of my incoming students.
This might seem like a trivial frustration, but at my previous school I had to pay out-of-pocket for items like tissues, hand sanitizer and dry-erase markers. I was also only allowed a certain number of photocopies each semester. If I ran out of copies, I had to pay for more. I would play math games in my head: If I made the font smaller and reduced the spacing and margins, I could reduce the amount of copies per child to two pages instead, and I would have more copies left for another story on another day. I became a master at the art of formatting assignments when I should have been spending time mastering the content.
This might seem like a trivial frustration, but at my previous school I had to pay out-of-pocket for items like tissues, hand sanitizer and dry-erase markers. I was also only allowed a certain number of photocopies each semester. If I ran out of copies, I had to pay for more. I would play math games in my head: If I made the font smaller and reduced the spacing and margins, I could reduce the amount of copies per child to two pages instead, and I would have more copies left for another story on another day. I became a master at the art of formatting assignments when I should have been spending time mastering the content.