Hello, I’m Jane Flood. I am a school teacher. I started the Seattle Pacific University’s teacher preparation program in 2015. The program took a year, my first class was in 2016.
As I was transitioning out of my military career I was looking for something that I would find fulfilling. I started volunteering in Sebastian’s first-grade classroom. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed working with the kids. His teacher was amazing; she really helped Sebastian, and I wanted to help other children like she did.
Last year, I had a student who was pretending to read. I knew he was bright, so we started reading together one-on-one. We read article after article, and we chatted about the information we had read. It was really fun, and we got to know each other pretty well. At one point we were reading a really fun book together. He thought the rest of the class would enjoy it, too, so we started over with the full class. He got all the lower readers to read dialogue for the characters in the book while I narrated. At the end of the year, he sent me a thank-you note. He confessed he had never enjoyed reading before, and he thanked me for spending the time and giving him a love of books.
I thought teaching was going to be an easy job, but it is intense. We spend many unpaid hours every week planning lessons and collecting materials. When we have a student who is not progressing, we work extra hard to try and understand them and to figure out how to move them forward. I love that challenge, and when you see a kid do something they would never have attempted earlier, it feels great knowing you just changed someone’s life.