A few times each year, when gathered together as a full faculty and staff, some of our ANCS educators are asked to share why they teach. These speeches provide insights into the lives of colleagues with whom we work and inspiration for the deeply personal work of teaching. For example, earlier this year I shared a speech given to our faculty and staff by Annette Wawerna.
One of our elementary campus special education teachers, Damon Sumner, kindly agreed to let me share the “Why I Teach” speech he gave to our teachers and staff right before school started this year. You’ll notice from his speech that, in addition to being a great teacher, Damon has quite a sense of humor. In fact, he is active on the stand-up comedy scene and he just so happens to have a show in Atlanta this Wednesday evening, 12/20. If you want to check him out, here are more details about the show.
“Why I Teach” by Damon Sumner
When I was a teenager, I had man-boobs. Not like, “Aww, he just ate a few too many steak fingers”-type of man boobs, more like a dense, “they look like they are full of loose nickels”, could feed an infant, type of boobs. When I was 13, I remember being at a swimming pool with a bunch of friends. We were having a good time and it was time to get out, so we could go have lunch. And I let everyone get out before me, then snuck back to my chair, grabbed my shirt, which unknowingly just became a wet t-shirt, to not showcase my middle school cleavage. I tell you that because that was the day I remember saying to myself, “one day, I am going to buy a speedo” I said that. I knew that one day I wanted to be so fit and confident that I would walk onto a beach, dressed in nothing but some shades, a fresh bikini wax and a yellow speedo.
Why are you sharing this Damon? Simple. That is a snapshot into my fitness/body image journey.Over the years, I have realized that in this race we call LIFE, we have MANY journeys. Some of you are on a journey to getting your Ph.D. Some of you are currently seeking to buy your first home. I am currently on a journey of becoming the best husband I can be and the best father I can be. In 8th grade, I had a short-lived journey of trying to manually go from being 5’1 to 6’2 in two semesters by drinking everyone’s milk in the cafeteria. You should have seen me! I bought extra milk, brought milk from home. Once, I even drank after a white girl, which everyone knows is how you get mono!
But, my journey as a TEACHER is different. My journey as a teacher is different because it really isn’t about me at all. So before I get into why I teach, I first must quickly backtrack to why I started teaching.
I was a great kid in school. I went to a racially diverse elementary school and had a great overall school career. I was smart. They had to create a new spelling test format for me because I scored a 110% on every test for three straight years there. If I am being honest, I thought I was the smartest, fastest kid in the world.
But at home, things were different. At home, there was struggle. I came from a single-parent home, with two younger brothers, and growing up was difficult. We’d moved to 14 different apartments by the time I graduated high school. We were on and off of food stamps, which provided us luxuries such as Flintstones’ Push Ups, SqueezIts, Dunkaroos, and which began the love/hate relationship I wrestle with to this day with my former lover and current nemesis, Lil’ Debbie. But, my mom worked HARD. She worked two jobs, three jobs, did hair, drove buses, worked in factories, stayed late, did overtime and probably tons more I didn’t even know, just so, as she would often tell us, “SO YOU WON’T HAVE TO.” My mom didn’t go to college, but that was what she beat into us. “YOU ARE GOING TO COLLEGE”. Because she truly believed that our futures were going to be brighter, “easier” if we were more educated. More skilled. More prepared.
Fast forward to college. I am a junior now, studying Sports Journalism, dating this sexy, caramel-skinned young woman who was clearly out of my league. And not just like, JV and Varsity, out of my league. I mean like Filet Mignon to SPAM, out of my league. I mean like Idris Elba to Flavor Flav, out of my league. I mean like if she was making CEO of Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School Matt Underwood’s salary, and I was making my salary, out of my league. So, I knew I wanted to marry her, but I was making like $172 a month and knew that wasn’t going to cut it. So I took a job that I didn’t know would FOREVER change my entire world.
The Nelson Center was a facility where students had been taken away from their homes for a variety of reasons, so they lived there and went to school there. They came from families riddled with abuse and neglect. On the outside, things looked good, orderly, and structured as a visitor. But once orientation was done, and you were an employee and they gave you that one polo shirt you needed to wear daily, this place was BANANAS. It housed kids from the ages of 6-year-olds to 16-year-olds, boys and girls with a vast range of issues, struggles, special needs and a spoonful of CRAZY. I went in, as a young man, thinking that I was just going to supervise kids after school and help facilitate evening activities, but left wiser, softer and more aware to a world of youth, that even growing up as a poor black kid, I didn’t experience. This, to date, was the hardest job of my life. For the first six months, I hated this job. Wanted to quit every day. The kids ran that facility at first. They were the LAW and the ORDER. I once saw a 7-year old boy, break the nose of a co-worker, with a walkie-talkie. I saw a 15-year-old built like a Tonka truck, throw a love seat out a large window. I saw dozens of restraints, chased girls through fields at midnight, had a 5-year old tell me he’d murder my family and then attempted to throw a handful of doodoo at me. I ran after teenagers through cow pastures and across highways. I hated this job.
Yet, through all of this madness, one thing kept me from saying, “I am done”, and walking away. The teachable moments. Every so often after a kid would blow up, he or she would break down. Tears. Emotions. Vulnerability. They’d express any and everything they were feeling and thinking. Like how their dad was supposed come see them this past weekend but couldn’t make it, or how they tried to cut themselves so they wouldn’t have to feel hurt and pain anymore, or that they felt picked on by the older girls or that they just missed their families. They were broken. They felt Hopeless. Deserted. Alone.
I said that the first six months were the worst and that was true. But the next 8 months would be the complete opposite. I got promoted, helped hire a stronger, better team and we began to do work. We engaged the kids in more healthy dialogue. We began to build back trust. We simply loved them. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t all peaches and cream. I still had to do the dirty work, but there was a fresh air there that I hadn’t felt since I started there and I think the kids felt the same way. On my last night there, as I was heading out. I stopped by each kids room and on every chalkboard inside their room, was the phrase, in their little chicken-scratch handwriting, “We will miss Mr. Sumner”. Now, I know those words are usually empty and mechanic, but for whatever reason, I felt like they meant it. I felt like, either huge or miniscule, I had played a part in righting their ships, in helping them see life a brighter, in giving them a little more hope.
That same month, my wife and I moved to Atlanta, jobless, broke, homeless and pregnant to help start a church in the Old Fourth Ward. I know. You’re jealous. The first job I got here was up in Kennesaw. It was a facility, called Devereaux, that was just like the Nelson Center and since the recession was strong at this time and no one was seeking to hire an entry-level journalist, I had to take what I could get. This job is only worth mentioning because this was where the seed for teaching was truly planted. I remember like it was yesterday. Kevin, my coworker, and I had just safely transitioned a young teenager to the “Danger Room”. I say safely because the teen was about 6’1, 210 pounds, mostly muscle, while Kevin had jelly stains from the donuts he ate earlier that morning and I was shaped like the momma off Good Times. As we watched the teen sleep, we chatted about life and I noticed that he was reading a book with G-A-C-E on the cover and I asked about it. He told me he was studying for a teacher certification program and asked me the question that truly began my teacher journey, “Have you thought about teaching?”
I’ll pause here and say that, in my opinion, there are three types of people in every school right now. There are the people who are IN their dream job. They wanted to be a teacher since they could talk. They loved school, dressed up as teachers on career day, even made their brother a fake test to teach them about baseball cards. Teaching is what they WANT to do. I love this passion. It excites me when I see this passion. I remember last year when Principal Zelski was talking in a faculty meeting down in the library and she was talking about her interaction with a particular author, at a conference. And a teacher who shall remain unnamed was just fanboying out beside me! She was sweating, getting all red in the face because of jealousy. She’d lean over to me and whispered random facts about the author with a smile and I’d just go, “Lol. Oh yeah.” You know, like a liar. But it was encouraging because there is nothing like seeing someone do something they LOVE… Then there are the people in schools who didn’t see themselves teaching but fell into the craft and are now gung-ho. Maybe for the first few years, it was unsettling to be a teacher, and they knew they’d leave the profession as soon as something else opened up, but they didn’t because they realized they loved it too. Then, there is the third group. And maybe I am wrong and maybe it is just me, but it is a smaller group that intentionally won’t be in education at all, next year or two years or three. It isn’t their first love. Teaching came about and they hopped on the train but knew very strongly that it was just a swift detour to where they ultimately know they belong. That’s me.
I STARTED teaching because I NEEDED to. I was tired of wrestling kids for $9.50 an hour, I had a son on the way and my wife was looking for me to lead our family (as well as giving me those side-eyes that every husband can feel burning into their souls, when the wife is saying aloud, “I believe in you” but inside screaming, “Get it together!”). I didn’t get into the field to change lives, or build a better future. I started teaching because it was just the best option at the time.
I’ll speed past the alternative certification process I juggled through, and eventually to when I grabbed my first-ever teaching job at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary in Clayton County. A self-contained classroom for 3rd through 5th graders with emotional-behavioral disorders. I was NOT prepared. I was terrible my first year. Seriously, it was bad. First off, I came into the school year in November and everyone who has taught before know that if you’re walking into a new teaching job, before Thanksgiving, this can’t be good. It wasn’t. Again, the kids were in control. So, I did what I had done well for the past three years. I brought the hammer. I was strict. Mean. Cold. The opposite of what you probably know about me. You couldn’t leave your seat without permission. You couldn’t sneeze if I didn’t give the OK. But although they were now “in check” behaviorally, they weren’t learning. With three different grades in the classroom, an underwhelming paraprofessional and a 3rd grader who was on a kindergartner level, I relied on good teachers’ enemy: WORKSHEETS. I’d have packets for days. I’d have a math packet, reading packet, a packet for if you acted-up at lunch and needed to miss recess. That first year, I sent home a packet with a packet, just in case you finished the first packet too fast on Spring Break. I wasn’t a good teacher. I knew it and it ate away at me. That summer, I knew I wanted to be better. I knew because I saw a lot of ME in them. Kids who wanted to be cool, funny, had big dreams, but they just didn’t make the right choices and know, if I am being honest, were tied to a label of “special education”. No, I didn’t have the labels as a kid, but I did want to conquer the world, and had big dreams and wanted to do better than a Kid Cuisine TV dinner. So that next year, my first FULL teaching year, I came out on fire! I had centers planned, anchor charts, used technology. I was beginning to have joy in this new profession. Even after a fourth grader got mad at me, slammed his keyboard down and yelled at me, I was still enjoying my new craft. Those kids didn’t know what hit them. And it wasn’t because I was some amazing teacher now because I still had them packets on deck, but I think they were caught off-guard because I didn’t see them as a PROBLEM. I didn’t talk AT them but TO them. I didn’t expect them to be disrespectful. They weren’t bad kids, they were just kids who many times had made BAD choices and just needed guidance. Needed a light. Needed hope. By the time that second year rolled around, I made a promise to myself and to my students that things would be different.
If my experiences at the facilities and at MLK taught me anything about teaching it was: don’t take things personal, classroom management is key and building trust with students is a must. My third year of teaching taught me about finding the FUN and MAGIC in teaching. Shanghai, China is where we resided for my third year as a teacher and it was great. I worked at the Disney English Center as an EFL teacher and it could not have been more different. Now, there isn’t enough time today to share the many adventures I had personally or that we had established ourselves as the resident black family over in China, but it was fantastic. First off, I’d kidnap a Chinese baby. Seriously! They are adorable. The fat cheeks, the cute laughs… Anyway, after two challenging years in the states, I went over there with my family and was swept away in how a teacher could be engaging, and bring to LIFE all types of concepts and ideas and make them tangible and meaningful. We had FUN teaching. I remember once we transitioned the entire room into a restaurant to teach the class about money vocabulary. Or there was one time I had a group of 5-year-olds and we were counting to 20 that lesson, so we walked around the classroom all day just throwing around stuffed kittens while counting to 20! FUN! It was so encouraging to me, to see Apple or Dragon or Pinky, or Nostril or Line 11(these were their names), learn an entirely new language and be EXCITED about it. That I’d be EXCITED about it. I had never felt this and I knew that I wanted to take this enthusiasm back to America to whatever class I’d end up in next and ignite the next wave of students I would get the opportunity to work with.
After being back in the states for a year or so, and bouncing around a bit, I landed my first and only general education teaching job at a top-notch school, Hexter Elementary. This school was similar to ANCS. Great administration. Great teachers who enjoyed collaborating and great parental involvement. Here was where it all began to CLICK for me. I taught two classes, social studies and writing that year and it was superb. I had never experienced a CLOSENESS to students like that year. If I am honest, I am a little jealous of general education teachers, mostly because of the goodies they get during Christmas, but also because of the relationships they can build with their kids each year, unlike a Learning Specialist. I KNEW those kids. I knew their fears, their aspirations, and their worries. I knew that one student loved to sneak and eat the crust off other people’s pizza when they weren’t looking. I knew that the only Hispanic boy in the entire grade felt out of placed and overlooked. And I knew that one student didn’t have a front door during the winter and wasn’t really worried about my spelling homework. On the last day I was there, I left that school crying similarly to how I did back at the Nelson Center, just because those bonds had delved so deep down into who I was as a teacher. That was the year I finally realized that the kids teach us just as much, if not more, as we teach them.
So, why do I TEACH? Simple: Because I NEED to. I need to try to help one, even if it’s just one kid, know that they can do anything, and be anything. I NEED to show another black boy, who had crazy, big dreams just like me, that you have to focus and believe in yourself even when your circumstances say otherwise. I NEED to give hope to little girls who want to defy odds. Like the one Korean girl who wanted to be the next Beyoncé so bad. Unfortunately, she couldn’t sing and yes, she’ll probably fail at that goal, but everyone needs hope.
I teach because I get a chance to bring about positive change in a kids’ life, maybe it is for this year only or another three, but I know that I don’t want to take it for granted. I want to leave it all on the field, enjoying the ups and downs of this journey. This teacher’s adventure that has led me to here… ANCS. These first three years here have been great, and I am honestly excited about this upcoming year.
So, my encouragement to any teacher is to KNOW that you are NEEDED. KNOW that that Kindergartener NEEDS you to help instill confidence in him even at such a young age, that that 4th grade girl NEEDS you to remind her that she can be anything she wants to be, despite what she may hear in our culture and that that 8th grade boy, who gets on your nerves, may just NEED to hear that you believe in him, one more time, even if he has man boobs.