For every year I've been a teacher, the last part of the school year has been about gratitudes. Whether they're expressed in thank you cards, hugs, or meaningful conversations, there's something about the final moments of the season that makes me gratefully reflect on the people who have come alongside me with their generous time, wisdom, advice, hugs, and sympathetic tears.
This year, one of the very first people that came to mind was Natalie.
Natalie is our school's Design Thinking Director and my next door neighbor in this school building. I'm not usually one to get gushy, but she is a stellar human being.
Some teachers might be in the classroom to do the bare minimum and collect a regular paycheck. I've met plenty of those over the years, and my faith in the future of education plummeted every time I saw them ragging on their kids or heard them complaining about their jobs.
But once in awhile, you encounter an educator with an unquenchable fire in their belly for their craft and a rare and exceptional respect for children’s minds.
If there's anyone else out there who is losing faith in schools, I invite you to watch her teach for just a few minutes. Natalie knows more about curriculum frameworks than anyone I know. She reads peer-reviewed journals and books on the latest pedagogical research...voluntarily. She draws from one of the most comprehensive repositories of teaching strategies that I've ever encountered in my professional life. And she multiplies her brilliant humanhood by sharing her brightness with children.
As a Design Thinking instructor, Natalie empowers her students to think about human-centered problems. Then, with the aid of thinking routines, empathy looping, interviews with individual or organized experts, and prototyping, our students adopt a sense of agency to design solutions. In the past few years with her, our young problem-solvers redesigned PPE devices, our famously congested carpool route, widespread pollinator shortages, bus driver shortages, food supply chain issues, and pet toys. (Natalie sent the students' designs to Barkbox, a pet subscription company, who loved our students' designs and expressed interest in a deeper project-based partnership). Her classroom is often named as one of our students' favorite spaces on campus, regularly besting recess and PE.
Last year, when I was first invited on campus for a full day of interviews and tours, she was the single most impressive thing that I noticed about this school. I glossed over the students bent over clipboarded worksheets in the hallways. I wrinkled my nose at the slightly musty smell coming from the old stairwells. But it took a quick ten-minute chat with her before my demo lesson to realize this was no ordinary educator, and I was excited enough at the prospect of working with her that I signed my name on the contract.
Simply put, Natalie is one of the biggest reasons I can look back on this horrendous year and think, ‘Yeah. It was totally worth it.’
In quiet spaces this year, Natalie watched me struggle to hold back tears as I shared the details of my encyclopedic sorrows with our inept administration. I've sat helplessly while she shed a few tears of her own. But she kept me uplifted with regular check-ins, Adam Grant quotes, and grumpy cat pictures.
She and I have shed enough tears in these hallways, that towards the end of the year, an anonymous but wildly creative colleague left these shirts in our mailbox one afternoon -
We're planning to wear our shirts during these next post-planning days, which will also be our last days sharing a hallway space. Even as I'm glad to be leaving this toxic workplace behind, I'm bereft to be losing such a treasured colleague.
So here's to Natalie, an inspiration and a light to all who know her. Let me know when you open your own school, Visionary-Leader-Friend. I'll come out of retirement to work with you again in a hummingbird's heartbeat.
