Senior Stacey Greene’s day starts at 6:20 a.m. For those of you unfamiliar with the un-Godly hour, it’s about an hour or so after you get home from the bar and four hours before you roll over and hit the snooze button on your alarm to sleep through your 11 a.m. class.
Greene slips into a nice pair of slacks and a conservative sweater, grabs her pile of notebooks, workbooks and other supplies and throws them in a bag that weighs as much as she does. She lugs the life-size bag outside where the sun is not yet shining and the temperature hasn’t climbed past 35 degrees. She gets into her car and tunes the radio to the Kane show on Hot 99.5.
I love it every morning because it makes me feel like I’m not the only one awake at this hour,” Greene said. “But I’m aware that I’m probably one of few college kids actually awake.” Probably a safe assumption.
After a 30-minute commute, Greene rushes into an elementary school in Bowie. “It doesn’t matter how early I get there or how close I get there to the bell, I’m always running around like a chicken with my head cut off,” she said. Copies have to be made, chairs have to be taken down and the warm-up has to be written on the board.
Soon the bell sounds and the floodgates open. Kids rush into the second grade classroom and from that moment on, Stacy Greene isn’t Stacey Greene, “college girl,” anymore. She’s Ms. Greene, and she’s in charge.
She, like all elementary education majors at the University of Maryland, has worked her way up to teaching all of the lessons for the day. Last semester, she student-taught part-time and observed her mentor teacher, and this semester she started by teaching only a few lessons a day. Now she teaches every day, five days a week.
First up is the warm-up. An activity simply intended to get students ready for the day can take up to 20 minutes longer than it’s supposed to. Students often have questions. Some are related to the lesson, and others, like “Ms. Greene, why do you always wear the same black pants?,” are not.
After the warm-up, Greene moves into reading. She has students read on their own at their desks but calls small reading groups to a back table to read and discuss with her.
Next is science. Greene said she tries to incorporate an experiment or YouTube clip into every lesson to keep the kids and her supervisor, who will be critiquing her lesson plans, interested.
After science, it’s time for lunch and recess. But there’s no down time for Greene. Thanks to a tight budget, Prince George’s County could not afford to hire lunch or recess aides this year, so teachers have the added responsibility of monitoring students during those times. This means little to no time to prepare for the afternoon, make copies, eat or even go to the bathroom.
When students return to the classroom after their lunch break, Greene continues the day with a lesson in math and social studies. Students then head to their “special” for the day – art, music or P.E.
After “specials” comes students’ favorite part of the day, according to Greene, – dismissal. It’s also one of the hardest parts of the day for a teacher. “They’re excited to go home but you have to tell them their homework, make sure they have all their materials,” she said.
Once her students are out the door and on the buses, Greene said she usually sits down for the first time all day. “I sit back and look at the day and I feel like nothing happened today and yet so much did happen,” she said. “People always ask me ‘why are you always so tired…you’re just teaching?’ but I literally feel like I’m running a marathon the entire day.”
Greene gets into her car around 5 p.m. and heads back to College Park. On Tuesdays, she heads straight to a three-hour class on campus that is required of all elementary education majors. Every other day, she heads home to start planning for the next day. “I’m driving home at 5:30 p.m., and everyone’s at happy hour and I’m on my way home to grade papers,” she said.
With her full-time schedule, Greene said a social life is nearly impossible. “I forget that the world is still going on outside,” she said. “I don’t have time to think about the fact that [my friends] are going out.”
Making sacrifices that most college students don’t have to make has certainly not been easy. “I try to take 30 minutes out of my day to just sit and catch up with my friends, but 30 minutes a day, senior year second semester with your friends, that’s not how it should be,” she said.
Despite the hectic schedule, long hours and lack of a social life, Greene said it’s all worth it. “When I’m in that classroom there is no other feeling like that…being in front of those kids, having them look up to me,” she said. I can tell at this point, this is what I want to be doing.”