TEACHER Q & A | kindergarten teacher, work-life balance, tips for teachers

Hello you guys, this is going to be a Q&A. I have never done one of these videos, so I'm super excited. I asked you guys some questions over on Instagram, so if you're not following me there, then go check it out. But I have always watched these videos and they're so interesting to kind of learn more about that person, so I figured we would do one. I've got all of the questions that you guys asked right here. We're just gonna like rapid fire through as many as we can. Maybe we can do more of these videos if you guys like them. Let's get started. First one is, what grade do you teach? I teach kindergarten currently. I've taught kind of a bunch of different grades. I spent a lot of time in third grade prior to this. But this school year, if you missed it, I actually was supposed to teach first grade, but then my district involuntarily transferred me to a new school in my district after I had already been at the school I was at for two years. And we were already two weeks into the school year, so that was very, very stressful. They transferred me from first grade to a new school to teach kindergarten just due to enrollment, so that was very, very difficult. Another question is, how do you like kinder in comparison to third? Right off the bat, it is so, so different in so many ways. And because I've spent so much time in third, I really have always wanted to try another primary grade level, which is why I was super excited to teach first grade. Long story short, I do like kindergarten. I love the content of kindergarten. I love teaching them to read. I love just the overall curriculum that you teach in kindergarten. Not to say I don't like third grade as well. I love so many aspects of third grade, but in kindergarten, you have to slow everything down, just teach every single minute detail. And it is so exhausting in that aspect. I enjoy it, but you have to have so much patience, so much patience, and that's not a bad thing. It's just extremely different. The kids can do more than you think they can do, but also at the same time, they're just babies. They are just coming into school, and it is very hard for them to adjust, especially just being in school for six, seven hours, however long it is. It's a long time for a child to be in school, especially if they've never gone to daycare or pre-K or anything like that, so that's super difficult because they just don't have that much stamina. Overall, I do like both grades, and I like kindergarten. That kind of goes into this other question, is do you know what you're teaching next year? I have not heard anything about next year yet. I know most districts are kind of starting to get a feel for which teachers are coming back and whatnot, and I haven't heard anything yet, but to be honest, I really have no idea. I feel like I still would want to try first or second grade at some point, but I also still kind of miss third grade in a way too, so I don't know. It really just depends, because we also have no idea what enrollment is going to be like too. Next question is, what does Charlie do while you work? I feel so bad leaving my babies all day for teaching. Same. I am super lucky that when my boyfriend is in town, he works from home, so Charlie gets to spend all day with him, but when he is out of town on a work trip, she's home alone all day for eight or nine hours, and it makes me really sad. That's another thing, is the school I got transferred to is even further away from my house than my previous school was, so that's really, really difficult, and I feel so bad leaving Charlie for that long, so yeah. Next question is, my favorite work lunches? I would say when I am feeling productive, I will meal prep something for the week, and sometimes I kind of do salad kits and then a protein, whether it's chicken or steak, but sometimes I'll just go to the store and get a frozen dinner and call it a day, because that is just so much easier than meal prepping. It really just depends on how tired I am that week and how much energy I have over the weekend to meal prep, but one thing I always do have is a poppy, which I forgot to open, and no, Poppy is not sponsoring this video, but I would love for them to be. This is Doc Pop, and it tastes just like a Dr. Pepper. Next question, why did you move to Oregon, and will you move back to Buffalo? For those of you that don't know, I'm actually not from Oregon, but I teach in Oregon currently. I'm from Buffalo, New York, and my boyfriend is also from Buffalo, New York, and I know there was another question about him in there, so I'll kind of answer this. My boyfriend and I actually are both from the Buffalo area, and we met in Buffalo, and then he moved to Oregon for work, and then we did long distance for a year, and then I moved later. Next one, have you ever been a substitute teacher before, pros and cons? I actually substitute taught for a good three or four years before I actually got a teaching position, which I feel like not enough people talk about, and maybe that's more common in New York State, because at least when I got my teaching degree and kind of entered the job market, 2015, 2016, like that era kind of. In New York State, you have to get a master's degree to kind of keep up with your teaching certification. I directly got my master's right after I got my bachelor's in education, so I was substitute teaching pretty much the entire time I was doing my master's, and even a couple years after that. I kind of went back and forth. I got a long-term sub-job, and then I went back to substitute teaching, and then I got kind of a part-time job, and I never really had an official like year one full year. It was really just like jumping all over the place. Cons are the kids are not gonna listen to you as well as they do their teacher. I would say the pros is like, I really got to kind of see which grade level and which group of kids I enjoyed working with the most. So if you're still in college or you graduated and are subbing right now, I would highly, highly encourage you to just try out a bunch of different grade levels and just see what you like the best. Now, it's not gonna be exactly how it will be when you have your own classroom, obviously, because it's not your classroom, but for the most part, it's really cool to kind of see which age group you enjoy best. What was your college major in? I got my bachelor's in child education, and I actually had a music concentration. That was what I got my bachelor's in, and it actually only took me two and a half years to get my bachelor's degree. Before I actually got that bachelor's degree, I was part of a nonprofit music organization called the Young Americans. It's based out of Southern California. So right out of high school, I went to Southern California, and I trained with them for a year, and then I started going on tour, and what a tour is is essentially three months at a time, you would go to a certain area of the United States, or you would go to a different country, and you would put on three-day music workshops with singing, dancing, acting, all types of performing arts, and teach kids a show. It was basically grades four through 12, but sometimes we would work with younger, too. You'd put on a show for the community of what you basically taught those kids those three days. It's such a cool experience, and you build so many bonds and relationships in just those three days. It was absolutely amazing. I did it in multiple parts of the U.S., as well as Japan and the U.K. Doing that right out of high school was absolutely amazing, and I would not change it for the world. And the best part is, is when we would go to all these towns, we would do a workshop for three days, move to a different town on a bus, and when we'd go to each town, we would stay with homestays, so we'd actually stay with the families of the kids that we were working with. That was amazing and so cool. That is what I did right after high school, which is also why a music concentration makes sense. Before I actually learned that I got into the Young Americans, I actually wanted to go into music education, but then I realized how hard it was gonna be to get a job, so I decided that a job just as a normal general education teacher was going to be a little bit easier to get than music education, for sure. Next one, are you married? Nope. Would I like to be? Yes. Next one, I'm starting a new job and I really wanna know how do you maintain a work-life balance? I really struggled with this my first couple of years of teaching and it's really hard, especially when you just start out and you don't really know what you're doing yet because teaching is so, so hard and there's so much thrown on your plate constantly and the to-do list is literally never ending, but the district I work in now, we actually do get a good chunk of prep time. We get an hour in the morning every single day as long as we don't have a meeting or something and we get a 40-minute prep as well as a 40-minute lunch too, so we actually get lots of time and every Wednesday, we have a late start. On Wednesdays, we have that hour in the morning plus another hour and sometimes we have PD, sometimes we have to collaborate with our team and sometimes it's just more teacher prep time. We actually get lots of prep time, which is really, really nice because I know some schools, their contract time is 10 to 15 minutes before they even talk to students, so I'm grateful that we have a lot of time before we even have students come in the classroom. Where I was going with that is I have learned that I'm never gonna get everything done. I'm always gonna have more to do, so I've learned to never, ever, ever take work home unless for some reason I have to and it's like grades are due or something like that and I just didn't have enough time to get it done. I'm never gonna take work home. I'm always just gonna leave it at work and my biggest piece of advice is literally just take it day by day. If you have your next day planned and you're good to go, then go home. When I first started teaching, I felt like I couldn't start on Monday until I had the entire week already planned and I like to say I'm kind of a type A teacher, but I also feel like I'm an A minus teacher because there's so many parts of me where I'm type B and I don't even care that I don't have the week planned. I'll figure it out as I go. Previous me would be like, girl, what the heck are you doing? Because I would just go crazy if that was past me realizing what current me does. It also does help if you have a set curriculum and you already know the gist of what you're teaching and you can just follow, not like a script, but like kind of slides or a script or something like that. How do you have the motivation after teaching to go to the gym? Sometimes I really don't. I literally don't have motivation sometimes, but I just make myself go. I have an energy drink and I'm like, all right, I just need to do it because if I don't, I'm just gonna get in this lazy cycle and I'm just gonna feel horrible about myself because literally every time I work out, I always feel so much better. It's not even just about like losing weight or building muscle, it's about feeling good and whenever I work out, I just feel so much better after. It's really also just about discipline. I just don't have the motivation sometimes and if you have discipline, it's gonna be so much easier to go. I would say at least five times out of 10. I'm not motivated. I don't wanna go to the gym. I just wanna sit on the couch and eat chips and watch Netflix. You really just have to have discipline. That is my number one piece of advice for that. This is kind of going with that. Do you find group fitness classes to be sustainable for your work schedule? I would say most of the time, I can only fit in group workout classes on the weekends because with my current drive, it's really hard to like get back and find a time that works for me because I also have to take out Charlie when Mike's not home and it's just really hard to kind of balance. So I really only do them like once in a while. I used to have an Orange Theory membership and I kind of just strayed away from that because it was becoming way too much and that's the type of workout class that is just so high intensity every time and my body just doesn't respond well to that and it was really taking a toll on my body. I've got a couple other questions about like my workout routine and like my cardio routine. I would say right now, I play soccer twice a week just on an adult rec team and I love doing that because I don't have to work up the motivation to work out, which is really nice. I would say probably three-ish times, I'll go to the gym just depending on the week. Sometimes I'll do a workout class to another day and sometimes I'll just take Charlie on a long walk. Sometimes I will spin on the Peloton that we have at home. So it really just depends what my body needs that day and what it's feeling because every day and every week is very different. Ooh, what is my favorite craft to do? I don't know if I have really like a craft. I just tried doing air dry clay pottery with a couple girls for a girls night and that was super fun. So that might be something that I wanna get into eventually. I also ordered a punch needle kit to make like cute little punch needle coasters. So I haven't tried it yet, but I think that could also be fun and I've been coloring recently and that is like such a stress relief and I didn't realize like how much I missed it and how much it like soothes my mind. Next one is how did you and your boyfriend meet and are you still with your boyfriend? Yes, I'm still with my boyfriend. We live together. We've lived together for about three, four years now. We've been together for over four years. Actually, so we've lived together for three years. Pink, I have to do the math. We met in August of 2020. We met on Bumble in Buffalo in August, went on a first date, things were going great. In September, he found out that he was moving to Portland for his job and we were kind of like, what do we do? Because we realized that we liked each other and I was kind of freaking out a little bit. Little did I know, like he felt the same way and he was moving mid-October. So like once he moved, we both kind of were like, I still wanna keep talking to you and then we kind of made it official like end of October, early November. Then we did long distance for that school year and in like April, May, I started looking for jobs in Portland and I got one. So I moved there, did a four-day road trip with my best friend. Charlie was in the backseat the whole time. It was like the best four days. So that was in August of 2021 and I've lived here ever since. It was really hard to make friends at first but soccer helped me and I actually met one of my really close friends at a Buffalo Bills bar in Portland, which was awesome. Then from there, the friend group just kind of like grew and grew and grew and we had a little girls group and my boyfriend also plays volleyball. So we also kind of have a friend group with his volleyball friends and then I met girls through that. So it's really just like kind of these random connections that like eventually will happen but you really just kind of have to like put yourself out there and if you are too afraid to do things on your own, then you're probably not gonna really make friends that easily. So I recommend doing like adult sports or going to workout classes, meeting friends that way or just honestly going to a bar alone. Like you don't have to have friends to go to a bar or go to dinner or whatever the case may be because you're gonna meet people by just like going to events like that. Last question that I'm gonna do for this little Q&A is how do you get brands to reach out? So my social media journey has kind of been, I've just kind of flown by the seat of my pants because I really sometimes don't know what I'm doing but when I first started out, I would try to reach out to brands and like get gifted collaborations and eventually once I started to grow a following and get consistency with my content, then brands started DMing me and wanting to send me stuff. It just kind of flourished from there. So once you establish an audience and like tag brands in like your Instagram stories and all of that, eventually they will see you and catch on and send you PR and hopefully like more partnerships too. So I can do a separate video if you would like on like more in depth of like what I did in my social media journey to kind of get to the point where I am right now but it is currently 4.09 after school on a Friday. I'm gonna get out of here but I wanted to film this little Q&A because this is something that I wanted to do for a while but I hope you guys enjoyed it and if you have more questions, I might post another Q&A thing on Instagram or if you have more questions, you can put them in the comments of this video and I will maybe make another video if we have enough questions. That's all we got for right now. I will see you on our next video. Bye.