My name is Desere Shuter. I am 25, married, and have an 8 1/2 month old baby boy, Frank.

I decided to start this blog so that I can share the struggle of leaving a career I loved and figuring out how exactly to be a stay at home mom.

What I found through this struggle, was that I needed to start adopting the ideals I had as a teacher, to the type of mother I wanted to be. Therefore I first need to share exactly what type of teacher I was.

I was a high school math teacher in south Los Angeles.

As most people gave me the “oh wow, you are so brave” response when I told them what I did, let me first say that

no, I never felt my life was in danger

no, the kids were not scary gang members

and

no, teaching math every day to teenagers was not torturous

In fact, it was amazing.

See, I had the unique privilege of studying to become a teacher under an incredible mentor, who used a curriculum that fostered collaboration, trust, and respect in his math classes. He taught me about the idea of ‘status’ in the classroom. The idea that people come into class thinking of each other and themselves as “I am the smart one”, “I am the dumb one”, “I am the class clown”, etc. These are what he referred to as status, and he worked very hard to break these perceptions. If you are interested in this subject, I recommend reading Ilana Horn’s post on status, or her book Strength in Numbers: Collaborative Learning in Secondary Mathematics.

I adopted many of my mentor’s ideas when I became a teacher with my own classroom. My goal was to get my students to self-advocate, persevere, and believe in themselves. The tenets of my teaching style were:

1. Respect

2. Trust

3. Student-led teaching

4. Minimal intervention

   • teacher as facilitator

   • guidance through questioning

Working with students from lower-income, minority families, you begin to realize that the system has always been against them. They never believed they could do anything. But I did. I continuously believed in them and provided the absolute minimal intervention that I could, so that they could truly own their own discoveries and accomplishments. I called these, aha moments.

If you ask many people why they become teachers, as I often did before I decided on this career choice, you may get the response “I love when I can see a student understanding something, the lightbulb on top of their head, and the way they feel afterwards.” Of course, who wouldn’t want to spend a lifetime of shaping young minds and seeing the lightbulbs go off all day. But that isn’t how it works in the daily life of a teacher, especially when taking into account the way most teachers teach. This is what I realized those teachers were talking about (in math terms):

1. Give students equation
2. Students take notes of teacher using equation with several examples
3. Students work out own problems using same equation
4. Students get right answer
5. Lightbulb!

This is NOT what I would call an aha moment. This was NOT the way I taught.

How would I describe an aha moment? These showed up in my class like:

1. Give groups challenging situations (truly group-worthy tasks)
2. Have students attempt to solve
3. Students bounce ideas off one another
   • try ideas out
   • fail
   • try more ideas out
4. Students ask teacher who guides by answering them with more questions
5. Students answer teachers’ questions and end up figuring out how to solve the problems themselves
6. Aha moments

It all came down to questioning. The teacher’s role is a facilitator, who uses questioning to guide students toward the right answer. It is more than yes or no questions, but specific questions meant to drive each student toward their goal by building off ideas they already own. Students do the heavy lifting, they solve the problems, and they feel the true pride of getting answers correct. This is known as student-led teaching.

I not only treasured each student’s ability to have an aha moment, I also protected them. I always told my class “do not steal someone else’s aha moment!” I explained that, I understand you feel excited when you figure something out, but if you blurt out the answer, you take that moment away from someone else, and you steal that feeling from them. This was a big deal in my classroom and my students learned to respect that as well.

I worked on creating an environment of trust and respect. Students were trusted to make mistakes, they trusted me to support them and never judge, and they trusted each other in their groups.

I enjoyed calling on students randomly. If they didn’t know the answer, I would push them. These students were never used to being pushed by teachers before. Usually, teachers pick on the few students who are the ‘smart’ ones, the ones who volunteer, pay attention, know the correct answers. Under my mentor’s guidance, I never wanted that type of stigma, that type of status, to enter my room. So I randomly would choose students, and push them if they were unsure. There was no option to opt-out.

This made many nervous, especially the lower-performing students. But that was ok. I acknowledged these feelings. “It is ok to feel nervous, it is ok not to know. But I am pushing you because I believe you can do it, I would not push you if I didn’t believe in you.”

You see, these are the type of interactions you would find if you ever walked into my room.

Of course it takes months, and months, and months, to develop this type of relationship. In the beginning of the year there is a lot of mistrust and hesitation. Students didn’t struggle through challenging tasks, nor did they try out their ideas because they were so afraid of being wrong. But by the end of the year, my students were a family, embracing ideas as they came, and enjoying the beauty of every struggle together.

This is an incredibly unique thing to witness in a math class of mixed ability. Students being encouraged to try, with the teacher playing the role of an observer. The teacher provides minimal intervention, if any at all, to guide students in the right direction.

When I tried to explain what I did to friends and family, they didn’t really understand. I don’t blame them. We didn’t have experiences like this when we went to school.

The idea that I never really answered my students’ questions, let alone ever lecture how to solve problems, was weird.

My teaching style was also weird to other teachers, especially older teachers.

But I pushed on, because I knew that what I was doing was making an impact to my students. I knew that it was not enough for students to walk away knowing the quadratic formula. They walked away understanding that where there is struggle, there is strength. They walked away with the ability to problem solve in the face of unknown, challenging tasks. They walked away feeling good about their own aha moments.

And I walked away feeling that I was sending people out into the world who were secure, cooperative, confident, curious, and incredibly resourceful.