Teaching is a hard job. It’s hard to be faced with 25 – 30 or even more students every class period for 7, 45-minute time slots. Sometimes the kids are in and out of your room so fast and the day is so busy that you don’t have any quality conversations with students. With so many kids in and out of your room, you really only build relationships with a handful.

Alternative education is a bit different. You work with a much smaller group of students. You are responsible for more subjects and spend most of your day seeing the same students class after class. This brings with it special challenges.

First, let’s just be real. There are some students who we have personality conflicts with. We just don’t really care for them and they don’t care for us. This isn’t horrible when you only have to cross paths 45 minutes a day. However, in alternative education, you still have the random personality conflicts but you can’t get rid of the student after 45 minutes! We all have to learn to get along for a much larger portion of the day.

In alternative education, you are most often dealing with students who are academically behind in multiple subjects….and not just a little bit behind…we’re talking multiple grade levels. Not only are you required to teach students grade level curriculum but you have to fill in entire information highways!

Many students in alternative education settings come from a challenged past. They may have made poor decisions or they may have come from a less than stellar home life…. whatever the case may be, these students often times have not only the above mentioned academic challenges but face emotional challenges as well.  Teachers have to take all this into consideration.

These are the difficult things but if you’ve made it this far, you need to know that the best part of working in alternative education is the relationships that you build with your students. When you spend day after day with them, they learn they can trust you and with this trust comes transparency. You learn more about them than you can ever learn about your students in a regular setting. You learn what makes them tick…what passions they have…what talents they are keeping hidden from the world.

In learning about your students, you learn about yourself….you learn what education should truly be about….fighting for the underdog….meeting the needs of every student…especially those that administrators and politicians want to forget about….the very best teachers know these things….and the very best teachers don’t just work in alternative education…they thrive in alternative education!