My Team's History (1996-2007)

I started teaching at Southwest Guilford Middle School in the fall of 1996.

I believe that my first official day of teaching was September 24th.

After the 10-day count, it had been determined that two more teachers were needed on the eighth-grade hall.

Sonja Reid and I were added to a team that already had Tracy Garcia and Tonya Kaukola as teachers.

(Tracy and Tonya had started on a two-teacher team of about 50-60 students, with Tracy teaching language arts and social studies and Tonya teaching math and science.)

When Sonja and I added on, students from the other two teams were randomly selected to move to our team.

After immediate parent complaints--the students were already used to their teachers, and their parents didn't want them moved--several of those students returned the next day to their original teams.

Then, other students on those teams were asked if they wanted to move to our "new" team.

Some chose to make that switch.

Even though I've saved the chart below under the name "Midnight Riders Team Teammates," that wasn't actually the name of my team the first year I taught.

It's been so long ago, I can't even remember what our team's name was, except that I know it related to our school mascot, the Cowboys.

(We may have called ourselves the Wranglers. But I'm not absolutely sure about that. Since then, another eighth-grade team has used that name.)

I wanted to save this chart because the years are adding up, and eventually I might forget who I worked with and which year(s) I worked with them.

As you can tell from the chart, I've worked with Drew Sparks for ten years. I couldn't have asked for a better 10-year teammate.

Overall, I've been extremely fortunate to have worked with the people you'll see listed on the chart below.

There are a couple of footnotes I'll make at the bottom of this post (below the chart), based on some irregularities.

I won't take the time to comment on others right now, though I have plenty of wonderful things to say about the people listed on this chart.

Hopefully I'll find the time to do so in the future.

As you'll note, turn-over is a part of the profession.

Later, I might summarize some of the reasons that various teammates left Southwest Guilford Middle School, or at least where they went from here.



* Wendy Caudle left at the end of the third quarter to teach at the same school that her two daughters attended. Renee Faenza took Wendy's place as the math teacher, and Susan Admire took Renee's place for the rest of the year as our team's science teacher. Renee chose to teach math permanently after that switch.

# These two years, our team was a three-teacher team. Renee Faenza, Drew Sparks, and I taught our primary subjects, and each of us taught one section of science.

@ Adam Duncan did not start off the year as our team's math teacher, but I'm listing him because he finished the year and served for the longest period. Marie Munck began the year as our team's math teacher but decided to return to Denmark early. I believe Marie's last day with us was November 10th. A few possible replacements didn't work out. So, from then until about the end of January, three individuals covered the four math classes for our team. Jeannie Law, our assistant principal, taught two sections of math (and still took care of all her administrative duties as well). And two seventh-grade teachers, Katy Rees and Sandy Rittenhouse, each lost/sacrificed a period of their planning to come up to our floor to teach a section each. It goes without saying that Adam made a lot of people happy when he arrived.