Go Forth!

When I was a student in ACE, I remember the sudden quiet that hit at the end of our summer class session. All of a sudden, the eight weeks were over, and I was left with a resounding stillness. 

My Google Calendar, once filled with colorful blocks of Middle School Methods, Social Studies Content, and later Developmental Psychology, was now empty. I spent eight weeks surrounded by 180 people playing volleyball on the sand courts, running around the Notre Dame lakes, and eating the Southwest Salad in the dining hall with my friends. We stayed up late on weeknights lesson planning, and on weekends celebrating each other on the basketball court or the annual Talent Show. Summer at ACE truly was the best. 

But it is only that – a summer. The teaching had yet to begin.

I am a recent graduate of the 31st cohort of ACE Teaching Fellows, and I was blessed to teach two years of middle school social studies in Brownsville, Texas. Upon graduating this year, I started working for the ACE Teaching Fellows team as an Associate Program Director. During this year’s “ACE Summer,” I have spent the days and evenings supporting our new ACE teachers in their own journeys of growth, and I am both sad and proud to look around our now quiet offices knowing they have all been missioned to their classrooms. 

I remember the adrenaline of setting up my classroom for the first time, and practicing my first lesson, proud that I had figured out the smart board technology in my classroom. What followed next were months of teaching, afternoons spent coaching volleyball and basketball in our outdoor “gym,” and giving life advice to some of the seventh grade girls as they went through the slew of emotions that most middle school girls experience. 

While ACE summer is so joyful, it was the student relationships that filled my cup and made me laugh every day – Brissa’s brutally honest review of my outfits, Julianna’s never-ending questions, my homeroom girls bringing in a “squishy of the day,” and my eighth graders using their full lung capacity to sing Hamilton songs during our Revolutionary War unit. I am eager to hear what is in store for our ACE teachers: I can’t wait to learn the names of their favorite and most challenging students, I can’t wait to visit their schools and classrooms to watch them in their element, and I can’t wait to congratulate many of them next summer as they walk the stage at Commencement. 

As I begin my own new chapter working for the team here at ACE, I am thrilled to share in the joys and challenges of the ACE teachers I work with, and I look forward to visiting the schools and communities of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. in my new position. Although I am no longer in the classroom (for now), I feel blessed to support the 180+ ACE teachers who are off to do the good work we have prepared them for – the best is yet to come.