A First-Year Teacher’s Perspective: Literacy, Book Restrictions, and Classroom Realities with Trudy Shellenbarger

PODCAST Season 6 EPISODE 12

Trudy Shellenbarger

10th Grade Teacher

Escambia Hogh School 

Quotes of the Podcast: 

“The stars we are given, the constellations we make.” Rebecca Solnit

Introduction of Guest BIO – 

Trudy Shellenbarger has just finished up her first year as a 10th-grade English teacher at Escambia High School in Pensacola, Florida. Originally from Ohio, she received her Bachelor of Science in secondary English education and her Bachelor of Fine Arts in creative writing from Miami University in 2025. 

Interview

Agents of Change: Leaders/Innovators.

• 30,000 Ft. View – Why so we, as a society invest in education?
• What drew you to education?
• 1. Literacy rates/what I've seen with reading. 
• 2. Book bannings/media restrictions in Florida (where I teach). 
• 3. Newer issues from a young/new teacher's lens (things like AI, vaping, Chromebooks/tech, security--I'm not an expert in any of these but I've seen it firsthand for the first time in the last year).
• What are the biggest challenges to you?
• What would you like decision makers to know?”

Podcast/ website/ book shoutouts

Education Perspectives is edited by Shashank P

Intro and Outro by Dynamix Productions

Transcript

Liza Holland [00:00:02]:
Welcome to Education Perspectives. I am your host, Liza Holland. This is a podcast that explores the role of education in our society from a variety of lenses. Education needs to evolve to meet the needs of today and the future. Solving such huge issues requires understanding. Join me as we begin to explore the many perspectives of education.

Liza Holland [00:00:28]:
Welcome back, everyone, to Education Perspectives. We're so excited to have Trudi Schellenbarger here today. She is just finishing her first year as a 10th grade English teacher at Escambia High School in Pensacola, Florida. Trudi, it's absolutely delightful to have you here. Thanks so much for joining us.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:00:48]:
Oh, thank you for having me. It's really, it's really an honor. I feel like I'm, I'm your audience, right? So it's really an honor to be here.

Liza Holland [00:00:54]:
You know, but that's what Education Perspectives is all about, is that, you know, I mean, you can have these high-level conversations What really matters the most is what's happening in the classroom, right?

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:01:03]:
That's, that's true. Absolutely.

Liza Holland [00:01:06]:
All right. So from a 30,000-foot view, why do you think that we as a society should invest in education?

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:01:14]:
Well, an educator in Florida, unfortunately, sometimes it doesn't always feel like we are investing in education, but the optimist in me wants to say that it's because we as a species, as a, as a people have a need to invest in ourselves and in our children. And I think education is that. I don't know really any other way to move a society forward without it.

Liza Holland [00:01:40]:
Absolutely. So tell me what drew you to education in the first place.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:01:44]:
That's a really good question. I think really reading is what brought me to it, reading and writing. I was always a big reader. I like, I succeeded in that. And I think a part of me always wanted to work with literature and with reading. And I don't think I even saw education as a part of that until I was in high school and a friend of mine was going to join what was a program that was called Teacher Academy. And it was like a little program that was put on by the trade school nearby that allowed us to take a class that essentially was like an intro to education class. for your first year of college, but taken at the high school level.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:02:23]:
And as a part of that, you would go in your senior year and spend the afternoons of your senior year in an elementary school classroom as a teacher's aide. And I had only really joined it because I had a couple friends doing it. And I had 3 or 4 people, they were all like, they wanted to be teachers, they wanted to work with kids. And they were like, this is a great way for us to hang out. We'll have— 2 classes. We'll have— maybe it was just junior or senior year, but we'll have a class together for sure. And, you know, we'll get to leave early and go to the elementary school. And I was like, not totally into it, but I wanted to do something.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:02:58]:
My sister, my older sister did the business version of this, which was DECA. And that was the same sort of thing, but marketing. And I knew I was not going to do marketing. Not my thing at all. But I wanted to do something. with like work experience. So I went with that one. And of those 5 of us total, I'm the only one who actually went into education after high school.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:03:21]:
So—

Liza Holland [00:03:22]:
Isn't that funny?

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:03:23]:
Yeah.

Liza Holland [00:03:25]:
Peer pressure got you into it and here you are.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:03:27]:
Yeah, here I am. Got my whole degree in it and I love it. I love it more than anything. So I hadn't even thought of school in the way that I do now until I took that class and it completely changed Transformative stuff.

Liza Holland [00:03:43]:
I love it. I love it. Tell me just a little bit, since you are first year out, what was your experience like, you know, in college and getting your— going for your teaching degree?

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:03:53]:
It's a really good question. I, um, so I went to Miami University in Ohio, and actually part of the reason I went there was because they had a program that worked with Teacher Academy to sort of prioritize people who applied for the education school. And Miami, I think, does a fantastic job of making the education program much more rigorous than I think it— than some people think it needs to be. Yeah. And I think that, you know, people tend to sort of put their noses up at teachers and they don't really— I don't think it's generally viewed as an intellectual pursuit, but—

Liza Holland [00:04:31]:
Yeah.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:04:31]:
Miami absolutely treats it like that. And you spend your first 2 years in college really diving deep into the history of pedagogy and the socioeconomic impact of teaching and the institutional role that education has played in privilege and in power and inequality throughout the years. So being able to break that down was really foundational as a teacher for me, and they made it a really core part of the curriculum. And it really, you know, it ruffled some feathers because people would look at it and especially if You know, you thought, oh, I'll get my English degree or my education degree, and I'll go and I'll coach basketball, or I'll go and coach football, and I just want to go to high school and coach. It really whittled those people out because they realized that there was, yeah, a lot more to it than that. And, it was really good. I think it was a good way to force you to look at why you want to do this and—

Liza Holland [00:05:33]:
Yeah.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:05:34]:
what it is that you're really doing. And then you get to your junior year and you start with some fieldwork where you're student teaching, but not full-time. And then your senior year, you spend a full semester student teaching. And I actually did part of my student teaching in Luxembourg because, yeah, which was really cool.

Liza Holland [00:05:52]:
How fun!

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:05:52]:
Yeah, that was amazing. It was at an international school because Miami has a sister campus in Luxembourg, in Differdange. And so we were Living near the school there, but going to the international school and teaching. And that was a really amazing experience. So I— my college experience was great.

Liza Holland [00:06:09]:
Boy, shout out to Miami of Ohio.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:06:11]:
Absolutely, shout out. Yeah.

Liza Holland [00:06:13]:
You know, and that international perspective is really valuable, you know, because not everything is like exactly like how we do it here. And so that's fabulous.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:06:23]:
It was fabulous. One thing that was amazing about that school was it was completely free. And it was completely open to the public. It wasn't International Baccalaureate, it was the European Baccalaureate, but they were an international school because they allowed multiple language tracks. And so every student who was there was taking a main language track, which was either going to be English, French, German, or Portuguese, I think. And then if you were learning in that language, you would have a second language. And from elementary on, like 3rd grade-ish, you start learning your second language. And then by the time you're in middle school, you're taking some of your core classes in your second language.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:07:04]:
And by the time— yeah, by the time you get to high school, a lot of kids have started on their third language and are taking a, like, a foreign language class in addition to a class in their first language and then a class in their second language. And a lot of these students are international to Luxembourg. So a lot of them would speak a different language other than English, French, or German, or Portuguese. So they're coming in with their first language at school probably being different than the language they speak at home, and they've got a second language and then maybe a third on top of that. So it was pretty impressive. It was pretty amazing.

Liza Holland [00:07:38]:
Boy, that's phenomenal. That really is amazing. And you know, I, I got to live in Europe for a little while, and you realize the facility that people over there have in the spoken language. I mean, I took 8 years of French here, and I I could write and I could read and I could conjugate, but I couldn't speak it. And it's just a very different approach.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:08:00]:
Yeah, absolutely. It's like use it or lose it, and you have to use it when you're interacting with it. And I mean, the silent period with spoke— with second language, like when you're over here in the US and we're practicing in class, you are never going to overcome that hump of knowing the language but not being able to really use it because you don't have the place or the environment to.

Liza Holland [00:08:22]:
So don't get to get immersed in it.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:08:24]:
Yeah, it was amazing.

Liza Holland [00:08:25]:
Well, I know you said that part of what really brought you to teaching was reading and literacy, and you had talked a little bit about literacy rates and what you've been reading and whatnot. You want to share that with us?

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:08:38]:
Absolutely. So something that I keep getting— so I'm a, I'm a 23-year-old and I'm on social media and I see a lot of— I think my algorithm has figured out that I'm an educator and I'm young. So They love— it loves to show me things from other teachers, and a lot of these teachers are complaining about the literacy rates. And I think we all as a nation have realized that there's a serious problem with literacy. And I've only got a year of experience with like students on the ground, but I don't know, I kind of disagree with a lot of the information that I'm seeing. And I— not the information necessarily like the data, because the data definitely isn't Good, and I'm not going to disagree with it, but I think the attitude that we have is misdirected about literacy because a lot of what I see online is about these kids can't read, these kids, they can't write a full sentence, they can't pronounce words, and a lot of it will be anecdotal where they'll talk about a student who they had read aloud who would struggle with a word like silhouette or conjugate or like a long word. And once they see that long word, they stop. And I definitely, I saw that in the classroom too.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:09:54]:
Like we would read a lot of older texts. Florida is really obsessed with reading like old, old texts.

Liza Holland [00:10:03]:
Classics.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:10:03]:
Classics, yeah.

Liza Holland [00:10:04]:
Okay.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:10:04]:
And they've banned everything else. So, that's, you know, that's what we're reading, but they'll come across a word that they can't read and they either stop or they're just like, I'm not even going to try it. I don't know. I think it's kind of a mistake to bank your opinion of students' reading abilities on their willingness to try a word for the first time in front of an entire class of their peers and their teacher. And like, to me, it's true that they're struggling with reading and they aren't where they probably should be or where they have— where students of their age have been in the past, but they can read. Like, students, people can read, and reading is not a natural thing. We treat reading like it's— like it's lang— like it's speaking, but speaking is a very different facility than— faculty— than reading. And, you look at the world these kids are living in, everything's electronic, everything is videos, everything is short form and scrolling, and they can read as far as like reading memes, reading texts, reading tweets.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:11:10]:
Like they can read, but the way that we do it in school is different and it's hard to measure. And I think that reading comprehension needs to be worked on, but this attitude that people have about this inability to read, like Gen Z can't read, Gen Alpha can't read. It's just like, of course they can't because you're telling them they can't.

Liza Holland [00:11:34]:
Yeah.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:11:34]:
That's what's going to happen.

Liza Holland [00:11:35]:
Boy, that's so powerful. And I wonder, I have 2 questions around this for you as far as your opinion. One is, are we measuring the right things? Because how often do you use this antiquated language in your business world or, you know, in life in general? And, you know, and then the other is, how much of this is a fear factor that our system has built in that kids, my lived experience is that kids are deathly afraid of being wrong these days 'cause they'll get mocked, they'll get memed, they'll get, you know, all these types of things. And so if you're afraid to try, what is going to stop you from expanding and getting uncomfortable, you know, in your learning zone faster than being afraid?

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:12:26]:
Right, exactly. I think those are 2 really powerful questions. The first one, the relevance or the, like, what are we measuring, is I think a really good question. I'm of 2 minds of this because on the one hand, I think that building that stamina and building that reach where you can read long form, you can read in depth, and you can really get at and analyze deep texts, like, I think that's a good skill to have. And I don't want to say that, you know, we should move towards the most marketable or like relevant skill. But at the same time, I think there is something to be said about the way that we are measuring that ability. Because like for my students, they have to pass the FAST test, which stands for Florida Assessment of Student Thinking. And it is an adaptive test.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:13:20]:
It's 47 Questions, usually 45 to 50. And it's, I think, I want to say it's 7 passages, but it's somewhere between 6 and 8 passages where they're reading something between 500 and 700 words. And then they're answering like 6 to 8 questions per passage. And the test is adaptive. So they take the test for the first passage and however they scored on that first passage will determine the difficulty of the next passage. And Then it gets harder.

Liza Holland [00:13:50]:
Like that MAP testing. Yeah.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:13:51]:
Yeah, exactly. And then it's supposed to be able to determine their reading level. And it's a really hard test. Like I went on and I did, they have like a sample test where you can, as an educator, try it out. And it's, it's hard. I mean, it's a 10th grade. So like I did, I did well on it, but I'm sitting here and I'm like, would I have done so in 10th grade? Yeah. Me in 10th grade, like I have a degree in English.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:14:16]:
I have a degree in education. Like, of course I can take this test. But the way that they ask you to think about things, they're really focused on being able to analyze mood and style and tone. And all these things are very basic for English, but you'll read a story and let's say it's about like a guy walking through a garden and it's describing the garden and it's like a pretty nice passage or poem, whatever. It'll ask you like, why did the author use the image of this to display this idea. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, that's a really bad example. But like, my kids didn't pick up on that idea there. They didn't read that and think about the universal theme that this was like digging into.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:15:00]:
Like, this is a 3-hour test. This is a 500-word passage they are taking. This is what, question 30 of 45? Like, they're not like getting it to that level. And so when you say like, I think at the end of the year, my kids, I had 42% of my students pass the test at like a 10th grade proficiency. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, I don't know. I like, that doesn't seem— that is kind of in line with what like they say the national average literacy rate is. But like, if that's how we're deciding who's literate, like that is a Very intense way to decide. So as far as like measuring goes, I'm not sure that that's a measurement at all of reading comprehension.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:15:44]:
That's like a much deeper, different way of measuring it. Like comprehension is one thing. If we're talking about literacy comprehension, like they're comprehending what the text is about, but they're not picking up on exactly what you are testing them on. And I think that's a different thing.

Liza Holland [00:16:00]:
That is.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:16:01]:
So measuring, I don't know, like, I think that that needs a lot of work for in Florida, but, uh, I think my students are, they're terrified of messing up. They're terrified of being wrong. They're terrified of having something like, I think that social media plays a big role in that. I think that COVID and lockdown plays a big role in that because they're less exposed to things like they have a smaller horizon. And then I think just the way that that we talk about reading and writing, like the intimidation plays a much bigger role. Like if you put a big paragraph in front of me and you're like, you have to get this all right, or you have to understand this, or you can't read, I'm gonna be like reading the first sentence over and over again. Like, I, I'm stuck. I can't do this.

Liza Holland [00:16:45]:
Yeah.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:16:46]:
And I think that like—

Liza Holland [00:16:47]:
It's too high stakes.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:16:49]:
It's, yeah, exactly. And then there's just the level of like, I'm in class, I already don't wanna do this. This is a really big paragraph. This is important. And then like, I think the attitude that we have about school and reading is, it's hard to overcome that a lot of the time. And then the last thing that I'll say, we had a discussion. So I'm teaching summer school right now and we are reading The Hunger Games, which if any of my admin is watching, it's in the textbook. That means it's allowed.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:17:18]:
It's approved by the school. They're very strict about media, but it's allowed. And we're reading The Hunger Games and we got to the, the interview section where Katniss is being interviewed by the TV show host and all of the nation is watching. And I was pointing out that, like, this is a very public thing, and we were making a connection between watching reality TV shows and watching The Hunger Games. And if you were a Capitol citizen, would you watch a show where people are killing each other? Like, let's think about Survivor, let's think about Love Island, let's think about these shows where people kind of humiliate themselves for your entertainment. And we had this really interesting discussion because all of them have seen one of those shows and they enjoy The Hunger Games. And it was one of the few times so far in Florida that I've had where students were willing to state an opinion and then defend it verbally. A lot of the time, which is all why we're doing this.

Liza Holland [00:18:19]:
Like, I was gonna say, that's the skill set you want to be building, right?

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:18:22]:
Yes, exactly. Like, That is what we're doing here. So to have them actually get into this debate and have disagreeing opinions and adding on to other people's opinions and like expanding on their ideas and then saying something and then kind of hearing someone else's opinion and then changing their opinion. Like it was, it went really well. And obviously I think on the surface level, they were engaged with the content. So they liked what they were talking about.

Liza Holland [00:18:47]:
Learning is happening when they're engaged.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:18:50]:
Yeah, exactly. They're like, that's, that's what it was on top of that. It was. low stakes. There— it's a smaller group than a normal classroom, so I think that played a role into it. And then it was— it didn't feel academic. We're talking about TV shows and we're talking about like the movie or a book that has been made into a movie that they have seen in pop culture. And I think that in my experience in my regular classroom, a lot of the time we're talking about things that they have no personal connection to.

Liza Holland [00:19:20]:
No frame of reference. Context. Yep.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:19:22]:
No frame of reference. And a lot of my students are not, they're not traveling very much. They're not, and this is not obviously like they don't, it's not their fault, but their life experiences are much more limited than I think the admin is accounting for. And so their personal experience, their ability to personally connect to content is going to be different. And when we don't account for that, when then we're limiting their buy-in, we're limiting their relationship to education. I was looking over our textbook. Pretty much everything that I'm allowed to use is going to come from the textbook, and I can count on my hand the number of authors and stories that are about or written by people like the students in my class. You know, it's mostly white guys.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:20:09]:
It's mostly dead people who are from Europe, and my students are mostly Black. They are mostly— yeah, they're not European. They're alive today in the modern world, and they aren't relating to Shakespeare. They aren't relating to Odysseus and Homer, and they're not relating to any of those. And that comes back to that relationship building, that context. It feels like school is something they are not a part of. Like academia is not something that is for them. And so I think that's going to limit their ability to connect with the text.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:20:44]:
And then, I think the other layer of the discussion factor is like, we are having discussions, or I'm trying to have a discussion about, oh, what was Shakespeare saying when he had Prospero say this? Or, what was this tying into with this? And Tempest is a huge text. It's a meaty text. It's like a foundational text. And so, they just want me to tell them what the answer is.

Liza Holland [00:21:09]:
Yeah.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:21:10]:
I think part of that is intimidation that I already talked about, but then also, like, we live in a world where the answer is very easy to find most of the time. You're like, you're, you can Google anything, AI will tell you anything. So, like, we don't have to wait for answers. So, a lot of the time it's like the expectation feels like it's just for me to say, well, think this about this. And then, okay, well then why are we doing this? Because this is literature. This isn't math. There's no answer here. So, I think I wish that I could do a little bit more with the curriculum because Florida is so limiting with what we can talk about and with what we can engage with.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:21:47]:
And I have to get everything approved that isn't already in the textbook. So, if I want to show a video or if I want to pair The Tempest with an outside text or with an essay someone wrote or something like anything that wasn't pre-written. I have to submit a form and I have to explain how I'm going to use it, and I have to have lesson plans going step by step with every piece of, of the, the text. I have to present why this should be allowed in school, and then I have to wait for the principal to say that it's okay. So—

Liza Holland [00:22:22]:
That's a lot of time, and that's something teachers don't have.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:22:24]:
Yeah, exactly. And yeah, so I— and, and that's by design so that you don't do it. Or you do it only when you really need to and you know it's going to be approved. So—

Liza Holland [00:22:35]:
I have a real problem with professionals being micromanaged like that. That leads us into that whole book bannings. You've been dealing with that a lot in Florida. How is that affecting you?

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:22:45]:
The first day of my job, when I first showed up at school, we had a meeting with all of the faculty and the librarian stood up and said, and it was not, the librarian was just presenting the information, but she said that The district is so behind on reviewing all the books that are in your libraries that we're not accepting any more submissions. And so what she's talking about is in order to have anything in your classroom, it has to be available in Destiny, which is our online library. So it has to be something that parents can go on and see that it's in the library. Anything that's in the class has to be seen on Destiny. And in order to get it on Destiny, it has to be approved by the district. So All of the teachers, when this law went into place or this policy went into place, had to go and scan every book that they had and wait for the district to go book by book and say, yeah, you can have this. No, you can't have this. So that took obviously so much time.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:23:44]:
By the time I got there, they were like, we're not taking any more submissions. So I have all these books that I'd been collecting through college that I was going to put on a shelf. And I didn't have that many.

Liza Holland [00:23:54]:
Yeah.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:23:55]:
For like a classroom, like I had 200 or so that I'd gotten from like thrift sales and book sales and things like that in my old personal library from home as a child. Some, I had a bookshelf worth of books and they said flat out, you can't bring these into the school until they're on Destiny and they can't go on Destiny until we get everything in. So that means that as an English teacher that I couldn't have a classroom library. I had an empty bookshelf in the back of my room.

Liza Holland [00:24:25]:
Wow. Oh my stars. I'm sorry that's happening to you.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:24:29]:
So it got better. They eventually got through their, their list and then I could put things up, but it's, it's still just like—

Liza Holland [00:24:35]:
It's the point of it.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:24:36]:
Yeah. Exactly right.

Liza Holland [00:24:38]:
I—

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:24:38]:
it's their books. The kids are already afraid of books in a way. They're already not reading. The worst thing we can do is say you can't read this or this or this or this.

Liza Holland [00:24:48]:
Like, that was the last thing these, these Well, and I tell you, once you get to high school, you tell them that you can't, that's going to be an open invitation to say, okay, let's go explore and find this.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:25:00]:
Yeah, right. Here's the list of books that we don't want you to read. That's—

Liza Holland [00:25:07]:
Oh my God.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:25:08]:
So antithetical. And I think that, you know, so there's that level of it, and then there's the applying to get anything else approved. So it's almost like books are separate from school. Like, that's like an outside thing. If you want a book that isn't approved by the school, like, I am not allowed to give it to you as your teacher. Like that. And most of these— so if you go on the list, when I was— because I got really angry about it, of course. I can imagine.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:25:38]:
And like the first— I was looking online trying to access like what has been banned. Because if I can know what sort of things have been banned, then I can probably sort through what I already have and kind of get an idea of like, what I already have that's going to be able to exist in the classroom. And there's things like a certain edition of the dictionary, of like the Oxford Dictionary, was booked. And then like all John Green books are banned. There was a Guinness World Record book, like the 2001 Guinness World Record book, for some reason is banned. Like, it is just real— like, there's no rhyme or reason to it, it feels. And I'm pretty sure that at least this is my guess, that they had AI sort through keywords in books, like what books have these words. And then any word, any book that had a bad word, a taboo word was banned.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:26:27]:
And so you end up with books like the— maybe the Guinness World Record book said like, I don't know, beer or violent or like something that they said was bad. And now it's gone. Now nobody's allowed to read it. And I don't think there's that many like human eyes reviewing These things.

Liza Holland [00:26:42]:
That's where AI can go bad, isn't it?

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:26:44]:
Exactly. Yeah, for sure.

Liza Holland [00:26:47]:
Let's kind of flip a little bit and talk more about your first year. I mean, this is an exciting time in your life.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:26:54]:
It is.

Liza Holland [00:26:55]:
What things are you finding? What are you loving about it? What are your challenges?

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:27:00]:
Oh, that's a great question. I love so much about it, but first and foremost that comes to my mind is my students. I, I love my students. to death, I think. And that's been true whenever I've gone to student teaching. It's always been hard to leave my students, but the relationships that I've built with these kids, just like, it leaves me energized. Like, I'll go home like excited because these kids are so funny and they're smart and they're like, even the ones that don't do anything I want them to do or aren't gonna do what I say, some of them are like—

Liza Holland [00:27:33]:
Yeah.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:27:33]:
I don't have any favorite students. I'm gonna say that right now. But the ones that I'd expect to not want to come in my room, I was always sad when they weren't here because they, like, even the ones that are, are never gonna do what I ask, like, I'll go and I'll talk to them like, what's going on? Why are we doing this? And it's just so hard not to be empathetic with, with students, with these people. There, there's always something going on. Like, even when they're like gonna try and lie to you, lie through their teeth, and you're like, no, you're lying to me. And it's really frustrating in the moment.

Liza Holland [00:28:04]:
I can see it.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:28:05]:
Yeah, like, I could see that. That's— you think I'm stupid? Like, there'll be kids that are like, they're on their phone and I'm like, put your phone away. And they're like, I'm not on my phone. And you're like, you got to put the phone away. Like, this is not— I'm not— I can see with my eyes. Like, even with those most, like, frustrating moments, those kids are still just so, like, they're passionate. I have a kid who would often refuse to sit where I asked him to sit and would often complain about the work. that I was giving him and it was not relevant and it was a waste of time.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:28:35]:
It was stupid. And he was very oppositional. But like, I was a really stubborn kid. So when I'm talking to these, like the stubborn kids, I end up having a soft spot for because like, I wanted to argue back as a kid. I wanted to talk back when I felt like something was unfair. I couldn't let it go. And so when I talk to kids and I can see that like, It's not that they don't want to do this. It's that they feel like they're not being listened to, and they feel like they're not being treated fairly.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:29:05]:
And you give them a minute to explain, like, what's going on. And they're really, at that moment, they're really high energy. They really are. They're angry, they're frustrated, and they will say some hurtful things. And they'll be like, this is not fair. And they'll explain what's going on. I can't help but think of of myself as a kid being like, this is not fair. And I can't sit and just do what you're asking me because it's not fair.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:29:32]:
And so in those moments, I'm always just like, I'm reminded, like, we're all, every single person here is like a full human being. And like every, we're all sitting here and we're all just trying to get through this, this day. So like, even the hardest moments end up teaching me something about, about people and about my students and about myself. And then I can use that in my everyday life. So I think that's my favorite thing. My second favorite thing is like how creative teaching makes me feel because I'm given this textbook and at least how it allows me to be creative because I'm given a textbook and I'm given, you know, it's a short story and then there's some worksheets behind the short story in the textbook and then there's a test online. Then If I was a perfect little admin baby doing everything that they wanted me to do, I would give them the introduction to the story. I would have them read the story.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:30:27]:
I would have them do the worksheets, and then I would have them take the test. And then they would do that 100 times, and then they would go to the next grade. But, oh, I hate it so much. I'm not going to do that. So, I will look at what the textbook has. I'll look at what they're focused on, and I'll think, of another way for us to do it. And I'm not allowed to use Teachers Pay Teachers without getting it approved, but I can make my own stuff. So I ended up making a lot of stuff that I had a great time doing, and I think my students enjoyed a bit more.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:31:00]:
So I don't think people tend to think of teaching as a creative field as much as it is, but it was definitely a fun outlet for, you know, thinking outside the box, and that was exciting.

Liza Holland [00:31:11]:
That's wonderful.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:31:12]:
Yeah. And then was least favorites a part of the question?

Liza Holland [00:31:18]:
Yes, it is.

Liza Holland [00:31:18]:
Like, what are the biggest challenges? Absolutely.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:31:21]:
Yeah. Okay. So first challenge that comes to mind is definitely the materials that I get to work with. You know, I feel like I've beat that horse. I think the biggest challenge that I faced within my own school was kind of the feeling like a part of the school. And I think the school that I have— that I'm in is like, there's a lot of really great faculty there and there's a lot of really great things going on. But I was teaching in this— it's a 22-year-old temporary building. It's supposed to last 10 years and it's been there for 22 years.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:31:55]:
And it had a crack in the floor and a crack in the ceiling tiles. And some people said there was mold in there and it It was out far away from everything else. And so feeling like I was— like I knew what was going on in the rest of the school was really hard. And so there were a lot of rules that— this is like not totally because I was in the wrong building, a different building, but like there were rules. Like they have a 10-10 rule, which means the kids can't go to the bathroom before 10 minutes into class and then 10 minutes before the end of class. Like you can't leave the room. We have 90-minute blocks. So that's like within that hour, the rest of the hour you can, you can go, but first and last 10 minutes you're not supposed to go.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:32:38]:
Nobody told me that rule, so I didn't know that. And I, I had a kid once, like the first week of school, I had a kid ask if they could go to the bathroom. And I was like, yeah, go ahead, just sign out. And then someone else was like, they can't go, it's the 10/10. And I was like, what is 10/10? And I said, like, for a little bit I was just like pretending to learn from the students. Seriously?

Liza Holland [00:32:57]:
I mean, I mean, not that that's bad, but In this particular case, it's bad.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:33:02]:
Yes, exactly. Like, I'll learn from my students all day, but for them to tell me a school rule that I should have known is frightening. So—

Liza Holland [00:33:09]:
We have an onboarding problem.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:33:11]:
Yes, exactly. And we definitely do because I got there, there was supposed to be a tour for the new teachers and the district had scheduled a new faculty day for the whole district on the same day that they had scheduled, that my school had scheduled their new faculty day. So my school just canceled the new faculty day. So we just never had like a tour or like a meeting where they were like, this is what this is, this is what this is. And that would have been really useful and it never happened. So I'm off in this other building. There's the main building and then there's my building behind it. And I don't know where any of the— like, I know where the cafeteria is because I have to walk by it, but I don't know where the gym is.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:33:52]:
I don't know where the library— I had to go to the library, so I didn't know where the library was, but they would be mentioning the 600 hallway, and I'm like, I have no idea where that is. And I actually didn't even know where it was until the end of the year before summer school because I was teaching in the 600 hallway, because that was also a different building. And I could probably— like, I, I had a map, so I would have been able to find it if I had needed to go there, but it was a different building. And the way that I was going to it was like the wrong way until like summer school started because The kids were like, why are you going that way? There's this much faster way to get there. And I didn't even know because like it was, it's a weird building and it connects to the school. Like it's, there's like 2 entrances from one side to the other. So like I didn't know you could get to it from one side. So it's just stuff like that.

Liza Holland [00:34:44]:
Your school is not unusual. As a parent who's had to navigate multiple schools over time, there's always that craziness and you're like, What?

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:34:53]:
How did this happen? Yeah, where am I?

Liza Holland [00:34:57]:
I hate that for you as a teacher though. My goodness, guys.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:35:00]:
Yeah, you would think— I, I've heard they used to give, or that like there should have been a tour, and there would have been a tour. It was like a, I think, just a scheduling conflict, but somebody should have said, hey, this still needs to happen at some point during the preschool prep time. Like that we had like 4 or 3 or 4 full days of just like open planning time during that first week before school started. And like anybody could have said, hey, if you're new, we're gonna do a tour at this time, come and join us. And that would've been great cuz I didn't even know there was like a teacher bathroom. It wasn't in the building that I was working in, but it was like close to it. So I didn't even know there was that until halfway through the school year. So I've been going to the, the school, like the students' bathroom.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:35:42]:
And a lot of the time I still had to use that because it was closest, but Like we have 90-minute bells, 5 minutes between classes, knowing where a good bathroom is can, you know, make a difference. So that was a challenge because it wasn't just about the, the layout of the school. It was about expectations and more like nitty-gritty rules that aren't immediately apparent or like aren't explicitly stated. And then all of a sudden you're not meeting an expectation that you thought you were because nobody told you. that that was the expectation. And it's like just trial by fire. You're just learning on the, on the job, which, you know.

Liza Holland [00:36:21]:
Yeah, which could be easily fixed.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:36:24]:
Yes, exactly.

Liza Holland [00:36:26]:
Even a the most important rules cheat sheet.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:36:29]:
Yeah.

Liza Holland [00:36:30]:
You ought to have those for substitute teachers anyway, right?

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:36:33]:
Yeah, right. There should be some, here's what you need to know.

Liza Holland [00:36:36]:
Yeah, we can find some solutions to some of these problems.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:36:39]:
Exactly. Yeah.

Liza Holland [00:36:41]:
Anything else that you'd like to share as far as experiences here in your first year and what you're hoping for next year?

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:36:49]:
There were some other interesting things. I like, I don't want to hold, I like, I don't want to spend too much time on it, but the year-to-year nature of my job, my current job is a little bit more frightening than I thought because I, the way that I got my job. is kind of funny. I, so I moved down here because I was dating a boy and he had gotten a job. I'm not dating him anymore, but he had gotten a job. We both went to Miami of Ohio and he had had this internship down in Pensacola for 2 years. And I had told him, like, I don't want to move to Pensacola, so we should find it somewhere else for you to work. And he ended up not being able to find anywhere.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:37:27]:
And he went back to this place where he had his internship. And so that was May of last year. And he had found out that he had the job. And I immediately went online and I was looking at jobs in Pensacola and they were having this job fair that weekend. So I like called my dad. I was like, I want to go to this job fair. So I buy a ticket for the next day. This was Thursday.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:37:48]:
I buy a ticket for Friday. I fly down, plane gets delayed. I don't get in until 1:30 in the morning. And then 8:00 AM on Saturday is this school fair, like job fair. And I walk in, I go straight up to like the first table I see, which is this Escambia High School. And I'd done some online research. Like I knew, like I probably want to work at Escambia or this other one or this other one. And so I walk up to them and I say my name and they're like, oh yeah, come on back.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:38:14]:
And so we go behind this like curtain thing at the job fair and they asked me 2 questions. And then they're like, well, we'd love for you to work for us. Do you want to come on back and, you know, fill out the paperwork? And I was like, okay. So the— like, I basically showed up and got a job. Like, I— it was like I walked in and I got the job. So I was thinking they are in desperate need for teachers. And that sounds like I'm thinking like, oh, this will be an easy job to keep. Like, I have job security.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:38:48]:
Which like you would probably think like once you're in the door, like they want to keep you, but it's actually not true. Like they actually are very particular about teachers and about the— there's this like 25-step criteria that you're supposed to meet in your evaluation on a given day. Like the rubric for your evaluation is like, it's 25 different things that you have to hit in one class. And it's really hard to get all 25, especially as a, like a, you know, I'm new at this and I didn't, I didn't go to school in Florida, so I'm not totally sure what the expectation is, but the evaluation process is very strict. And the sort of like the way that you get your job, I have a coworker who had some, some various like personal issues. So I think absence has probably played a role in what happened, but she was not invited back to work the next year. And she was told this in the end of April and was given— so she had a 2-week period to go and try to find another job in the district in order to have a job the next year. She had gone from thinking she had a job to not having a job.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:39:59]:
And it was a really frightening moment because it didn't really seem like anybody had given her concrete feedback as to what she had been doing wrong or what she had been— what they were looking for and why she wasn't being invited back. She just wasn't invited back. And she pursued further feedback and was looking for, you know, what did I do wrong? How can I better— if I go to another school, can I at least get some info about what it is that you don't want me back for? And they were very I don't know. I wasn't there and I wasn't a part of the conversation. So I think that there's probably two sides to the story. And I do think that there's some things that the particular teacher maybe wasn't doing fully correctly, but she got the union involved. So I think in that case she did do everything correctly.

Liza Holland [00:40:51]:
Feedback camp.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:40:52]:
Yeah, to back her up. But the district, I was a bit disappointed in the level of feedback or the level of communication that was available to her. before she had to be on the chopping block. And I think, you know, as educators, we get put through so much. We have to deal with so much, and you have to wear so many hats. And for your— all of that work and all of that passion to be reduced to like a rubric that is based on one day of your year, and then, you know, whatever other evidence they've collected, they're not sharing with you.

Liza Holland [00:41:31]:
Kind of like state testing.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:41:32]:
Yeah, exactly.

Liza Holland [00:41:33]:
Once they're shot in time and yeah.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:41:35]:
Right. Yeah. Another day. Yeah. So like for that to be the factor about whether or not you have a livelihood is pretty frightening. And I like, I think that's another, another thing that I hadn't even considered. I thought, oh, they need me more than I need them. So of course they're going to keep me, but they want you in the door and then they'll toss you out and get the next Kentucky's like that on an across-the-board basis.

Liza Holland [00:42:00]:
If you don't have your tenure and whatnot, everybody is considered pink-slipped. And then they just need to find out if— and some teachers are not finding out until day 5 of the next school year if they've made the enrollment numbers to be able to bring some people back. And I mean, when I found that out, I was horrified because I'm like, my God, we're having a teacher shortage as it is. What are we doing here?

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:42:25]:
Yeah, we've got people willing and able to do this. Yeah. And you're just throwing them to the wayside. It seems so backwards. Yeah.

Liza Holland [00:42:33]:
It does indeed. Well, you have surfaced a lot of really good things that decision makers need to know. But my last question is, what would you like for decision makers to know? And you can choose who those decision makers are. It could be your voters. It could be the legislators that are setting up all this stuff. It could be your administrators. Could be educators, could be parents, right? What kinds of things would you like people to know?

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:42:59]:
That's a really good question, and I want to really, you know, put my words behind this. For parents, I would like parents to know that teachers are not indoctrinating children. And I feel like in Florida I need to say that because there's this attitude, especially even just in like the emails that we'll get from like The guy who deals with the union, like he's very anti-union. He'll send out these emails where he's like, this is what the union just did. And it's like, he'll be like, they were focusing on social emotional learning and like, like wasting your union dues trying to get emotional learning on the curriculum or like something ridiculous where it's just like, you're acting like we're out here trying to, you're acting like there's more of an agenda than there is. So you're acting like there's more. like there's something sinister behind the idea of social-emotional learning. It always comes back to the fearmongering about the, you know, LGBTQ issue and the, you know, critical race theory in schools.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:43:59]:
And there's just such a misunderstanding about that and about—

Liza Holland [00:44:03]:
And they're missing the point of the fact that the top 5 skills that employers are asking for, both on a worldwide basis and at state level and local level, are those social and emotional learning skills. It's communication, collaboration, you know, adaptability, all these different types of things that, that's what SEL actually helps to infuse into your curriculum.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:44:30]:
Exactly. The space that that is taking up is practical, and it just gets misconstrued, and it gets mis— like, completely strawmanned. And I think There, I'm sure the audience that I'm reaching here knows this already, but there's just no, like, there's no agenda beyond improving the lives of your students. So like, if that's what you're worried about, then I, that needs to be reconsidered. For like a more legislative perspective or opinion, I would like legislators, decision makers to know that the problem isn't I think that for me, it's like the reading is what comes to mind. And I think there's a million things I could say about legislators. Students need books. Students need time to read.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:45:17]:
Students need the confidence to read. Students don't need more tech. I think there's definitely— I see the argument for tech and I like technology to a certain extent. I don't think that I'm an advocate of no technology in the schools, but to allow tech companies to influence legislation, I think, is a bad move. We need technology to be a tool as much as a pencil is a tool or as much as a good book is a tool. It doesn't need to be the teacher, and it doesn't need to be the power in the room. Because tech— like, I don't want to say we can't have technology because we just— we need to know how to use technology. But we also—

Liza Holland [00:45:57]:
It's a balance, right? And it's finding ways to be able to get kids thinking through how they are using technology as a tool as opposed to, you know, I mean, I know there's so much panic out there in the education space about AI, but the fact of the matter is it's here. And it's also one of the number one skills that are being recruited for now is that knowledge. So how do we actually get kids to understand that this is a tool and you are the driver that needs to think through and give it the best questions To be able to get actually good answers.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:46:33]:
Exactly. Yeah. How are you the driver? Put yourself in the driver's seat with this. Don't let this be the thinker or the doer. But, you know, when considering that, like, legislation, like, there needs to be, like, a limit to what we're allowing Peter Thiel to say or whoever else is in charge of the, of getting AI out there. Like, they have an agenda as much as Anybody else has an agenda. So let's just like, let's think of what is really powerful and in the room. It's not always the thing that makes the most money.

Liza Holland [00:47:07]:
Those are awesome things. Absolutely, it is. And those are really good answers. Really good answers. I feel like I could talk to you all day long. But I guess we are kind of coming up against time limits here. But I just wanted to thank you so very much for taking the time. This has been an enlightening discussion.

Liza Holland [00:47:23]:
And I think you've brought forward a lot of things that people talk about, but you have given it context and you have given it real-world perspective. So I thank you so very much.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:47:34]:
Thank you. It's been great. I love— I could talk about this all day. And thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to me. This is, uh, this has been really a privilege, and I've had a great time. But also, thank you for putting on this podcast. I, I've checked out the episodes.

Trudy Schellenbarger [00:47:50]:
I have listened after I learned about it. I went on a rabbit hole, and I really appreciate the conversations that you're having and the thoughts and the experts that you're platforming. I think it's fantastic.

Liza Holland [00:48:03]:
Thank you so, so much.

Liza Holland [00:48:06]:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Education Perspectives. Feel free to share your thoughts on our Facebook page. Let us know which education perspectives you would like to hear or share. Please subscribe and share with your friends.