Kelly

Age: 48

Occupation: High School English Teacher

To all those who say, “Those who can’t do, teach,” I encourage you to have a conversation with this woman. She proves that education is not a backup plan, but rather a passion that often finds you when you aren’t looking for it. I dare you to find a teacher who found their profession because they love spitting their knowledge at people. I’m going to tell you now that you probably won’t find that person, and if you do, you will hate taking a class with them. Most of us find our passion in education in the relationships we get to build and the lives we get to touch. Kelly Yazzie makes it her goal not to have her students memorize material, but to explore the idea of learning and growing both as a student and an individual.

“So why don’t you tell me a little about the career path that got you to where you are?”

She laughed, “How much time do you have? I was going to law school and I got involved with the mock trial program where I was working with seventh graders and doing lesson planning with them and there weren’t enough hours in the day to plan those lessons because we had so much fun. I enjoyed it so much. And I thought maybe I’m missing my calling, but I was in law school and didn’t want to walk away… I was at a tanning salon for a while, a waitress. I had a year working odd jobs in offices while I was getting ready for the Bar and that’s where I realized that I needed a job with human interaction. I wanted something where I could be creative.

“After taking the Bar, I worked for the public defender’s office as a defence attorney. It had the creativity and the connection with people. The part I didn’t like was being a part of a system I didn’t believe in. It was then that I decided to move to a Navajo reservation to practice law. I didn’t get a job right away because they only had one law firm, so I worked in the school district as a temp in a third and fourth grade classroom and I had no idea what I was doing. After that, I started teaching at the community college until the fall when I got a job at the firm… I had one really crazy case that through me threw a loop.

“Around that time, I got an offer from the district as an English teacher. I was offered 8,000 more a year as a teacher than as a lawyer and they offered me housing, so of course I took it, but it could be a really difficult job. There was a lot of turnover with both administrators and teachers. And we had no resources: no internet, no textbooks, nothing. I remember there was once a book that I really wanted to teach, so I went and bought twenty copies myself, but of course I couldn’t keep up like that. I ended up teaching a lot of poetry because I could just copy it. After that, I ended up getting married and moving to Colorado and now here we are!”

“Do you think that your experience in education played a role in this crazy path that your life ended up taking?”

She paused for a moment, picking apart the significant memories and trying to piece them back together to answer my question,“When I was in elementary and middle school, I was in gifted and talented and we had lots of opportunities. It made me feel special and interested in learning, but we also had a lot of resources and I felt… spoiled. But then I got to high school and we moved a lot. Every time I moved, I lost connection and I lost interest. I didn’t identify as a student anymore and I lost that part of myself and I eventually dropped out of high school. I actually had this one teacher who I needed to sign my paperwork to drop out and when I came to his class, he made an example of me to the rest of the students. He told them not to end up like me: a failure… I had a time when I didn’t have a direction. When I eventually had that time when I came back, it was interesting to see how much education impacted my identity. And a lot of that had to do with how my teachers viewed me: good and bad.”

I tapped my fingers on my keyboard angrily and had to take a deep breath for composure before asking, “Do you think you would have become a teacher if it weren’t for that experience?”

“Maybe in some ways. But I don’t like to think of my career choice as getting back at a system that hurt me. Education appealed to me because of other jobs that I had and it had something that those other jobs didn’t: happiness. It’s fun to be with young people, not watching the clock. Those things killed me soul. Being in a career where I could do all those things that make me happy pushed me in that direction. The most important part of my job is human connection… That teacher didn’t treat his career the way I do. I try to remember that feeling that he gave me, because I want to make sure that my students never feel worthless like he did.”

The zest for her career and her life made me smile, but it quickly faded as the gears in my head turned. I believe that my most significant memories from my academic career stemmed from the moment where my instructors made me feel… human. Keep in mind that I say “moments” because there weren’t many of them in my time in a system that seems to focus on dehumanizing the student population.

“How do you feel about teaching with these ideas at the core of your philosophy in a time when teachers are forced to focus on standardized testing?”

“When I think about testing, I think of two things: standardized testing which is culturally biased and total crap. And then I think about IB testing and if you get a score, you get credit, so that’s worth while. What do you do with a student who doesn’t care if she fails the test? Why do I care? And it made me think that at the end of the day, it's really about supporting what the kids want. Testing is taking us down the wrong path. Education should be about teaching how to learn, not how to pass a test.”

“It all comes back to that idea of letting students know that they’re human, isn’t it?”

“Exactly. I think it’s important to be with people who see you, support you, and help you find who you truly are. That can be bigger than education, but shouldn’t that be the point of education? You should be able to walk into a classroom as your true self and nothing less.”