Strem Talks

A few years ago I found myself looking through my high school yearbook and found the most interesting note from an old friend.  It said, “You are the most fight-for-your-rights person I know”.  When I was in high school I spent an inordinate amount of time fighting the injustice I saw everywhere.  I was idealistic and believed that I could make a difference with my words and my voice.  I find myself, years later, feeling rather hoarse.   It’s been 12 years since I graduated from high school.  Since then, I have graduated from college.  I taught for six years.  I have developed relationships with those around me.  I have also voiced my opinions about the state of this world, but after spending as much time as I have screaming about the endemic issues that plague our society, I found myself exhausted and almost to the point of giving up.  I sat and watched our country elect a man who is the epitome of the things I fight against: greed...

I have had countless years of students telling me, “I can’t do this…”   Usually when this happens I bring up one specific student who, at the end of his Senior year at HCSS told me that I was the voice in his head saying, “You got this kid…”  I explained to my students that it doesn’t have to be my voice it just has to be a voice saying that they can.  I hated to quote the Little Engine that Could, but if you think you can, chances are you will.  However, understanding that doesn’t mean that doubt doesn’t creep into the cracks and crevices that life leaves behind in a person.  I believe that as you go through life, the bumps and bruises you get along the way leave little inlets for doubt to seep into like a parasite.  These cracks can become better, but it takes hard work.   When I started teaching, I felt so much doubt in myself and in my abilities.  I felt like I was working so hard and yet nothing was the way it should be.  I was ...

A love letter to the last 6 years… This year marks a change in my life that I thought about many times but that I never actually saw becoming a reality.  For half of my adult life, I have taught in Chicopee.  My first year, I was a high school teacher (and a rather terrible one) and then came the biggest transformative moment in my young life: I was going to be forced to teach middle school (I bolded forced on purpose, since there was no option and I cried hysterically when I got the news).  So I became a 6 th and 7 th grade middle school teacher at the tender age of 25.  This was my quarter life crisis.  This was a moment when I faltered and thought to myself, “Should I stay and try this out or do I run far, far away from this?”  When I decided to be a teacher I would say, “I’m thinking high school, because I was even a nightmare in middle school and I was a half decent kid.”  I had a tough year in my own personal life that first year and the ...