Excerpt from “When the Roots are Still Alive” by Jennifer Ernsthausen

I am ashamed to admit that I used to view my students, who were rough around the edges or low achieving, as potential failures. But I now know that it was my failure, not my students’. I have started seeing such challenging children as opportunities for growth. A few years ago, one of my students, Jasmine, would last about half a period or so before overturning her chair and walking out. I would dread the moment she would leave and the distraction it always caused, but a piece of me felt that now I could focus on the other students with her gone. Half way through the year, I realized that I was not taking responsibility for educating her, and I was allowing her behavior to justify not being accountable to her. I decided to change. Instead of hoping Jasmine would leave sooner than later, I began to challenge myself to see how long I could engage her to stay.

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Jennifer Ernsthausen teaches third grade in the Pittsburgh Public School District.

Excerpt “The Aftertaste of Testing” by Kathleen Hicks

What they never tell you about teaching is that when you’re a teacher, you’re also a college student and a high school student and a middle school kid and a grade school baby and somebody’s daughter before all of that. And, when you wake up in the morning you expect to feel like a teacher, but you don’t. It feels like every other day. And you don’t feel different at all, just layers of paint, color after color, on the same old piece of furniture.

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Kathleen Hicks received a B.A. from California Lutheran University and a M.Ed. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She facilitates a writing pedagogy course at a local university and is a fellow through U.C.L.A.’s Writing Project while continuing to doggy paddle through her third year of teaching remedial language arts, English 10, advanced placement language and composition, and acting as department chair in South Los Angeles at Ánimo Locke 1, a school specializing in supporting English language learners.

Excerpt from “The Calling” by Brandy Price

I went into teaching out of fear. After watching my dad botch the beatnik path, I was petrified of the failed artist’s life. Indeed, while my heart belonged to sports writing and dreams of writing for Sports Illustrated, my mind steered me to teaching. Teaching was my sure thing, my stable thing, my something to fall back on. Over the course of a school year, it became my calling.

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Brandy Price has been a teacher since she was eight—first holding neighborhood kids captive in a makeshift classroom before moving on to a more formal setting. She is currently the principal of Ingenium Charter School in Canoga Park, California.

Excerpt from “Althrea Tells Me Gangs Mean Love" by Mark Gozonsky

Tyrane, in contrast, did nothing on the final, which was what he had done in class all year, except for the time when I had them build arguments out of craft sticks. He had said he was good at building stuff, why couldn’t I have them build stuff instead of writing. He built a solid structure involving pathos, logos and ethos. I sent a picture of him giving a big thumbs up to my dad. (“White guys love giving a big thumbs up,” I heard him explain later.) But, since I had sent that photo to my father, I felt I couldn’t give up on or decide to hate Tyrane, even though he was always disruptive in class, feeling up the girls and complaining that I wasn’t teaching shit.

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Mark Gozonsky earned a B.A. in English at Cornell and took a class in journalism at San Francisco State before getting a part-time job covering the A's and Giants with Jimmy Ilson for Calendar, the forerunner to SF Weekly. His essay, "Althrea Tells Me Gangs Mean Love,” which was originally published by Indiana English, was written during the summer of 2011, while Mark worked as a fellow in the U.C.L.A. Writing Project.