Chapter 7: An Irregular Verb They Cannot Conjugate: One Latina’s Autoethnographic Journey Out of Teaching

I had zero Latinx teachers from the time I was in kindergarten all the way through my bachelor’s degree. Worse, my heritage, our ways of being and knowing, were entirely absent in the culture of my schools and the curriculum. Encouraged by my educator parents, I decided to teach. Soon, I got a glimpse into education from a completely different point of view. My first experience as an educator was volunteering to teach Spanish to kindergarten students in a poverty-stricken neighborhood in Central Florida. The classroom I was given smelled of mildew and was smaller than a standard two-car garage; it consisted of two small, oval, wooden tables that barely fit 12 youth elbow-to-elbow. The real injustice was not the state of the classroom, but the fact that there were neither curricula nor age-appropriate books, or even enough writing and coloring utensils for the students. After a short time, I left. I then taught preschool for 2 years in a nearby school, where I encountered similar problems with curriculum and inappropriate materials. This time, I experienced high-stakes gendered assessments for the first time. There must be great schools somewhere! An optimist at the time, I left that position to pursue a better teaching environment.