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Hi, my name is Rose Porter and I'm at Northwoods Middle School in North Charleston, South Carolina. I am a sixth-grade English teacher and an English department chair. I've been at Northwood for about 11 years now. I've been teaching for, this is my 12th year teaching.

Why did I start my career in education? I've just always been compelled to love, to teach people to do things, whether it be kids or adults. I just love when I learn something, I really wanna show somebody else how to do it. I just enjoy teaching others.

What I know how to do, um, your job, what would it be? If I wasn't teaching middle school, my plans for maybe in the future sometime is to teach at the college level to be a teacher teaching in the education department and actually work with teachers that are or students that are in college to go into teaching. I really want to try to impact and get more people to go into teaching careers. Our numbers are getting a little lower and lower, especially in middle school. So it's a struggle. I would really like to build that back up and get more people interested in being teachers. 

How are kids, how are kids different now than 30 years ago? Well, 30 years ago or maybe a little more I was in middle school and so, um, I would say 30 years ago we did, of course, all books and paper and lots of writing. Lots of worksheets. We still did projects as well, but not all this technology in the classroom. 

So teaching nowadays 30 years is a lot different. It's a lot more hands-on. It's a lot more. Um, you have to be a lot more engaging and the kids have unfortunately shorter attention spans because they're used to that instant gratification that happens with little short, 32nd, you know, TikTok videos and, and all of the, um, Snapchats, all of these instants, real short, you know, attention grabbers it, we have to incorporate that into education to get their attention and make it relevant to their lives. Now we can't expect it to be the same as it was 30 years ago.

Right now the generation that would be going in or graduating college has grown up with technologies. So they're a lot more used to that same instant you know, creativity, things moving about every 10 minutes. So I think they're a little bit more apt to make it relevant. So it'd be a great career now, unfortunately. I'm hoping that there's a lot more advocacy for salaries because that's the drawback that is causing lots of people not to go into teaching is the salaries just don't meet up. 

What, it's one thing that I would change to help kids learn better try to expand that attention span and to read, uh, I'm a, of course, ELA teacher to sixth grade and I just, the more kids read the better, it affects all of their core content classes, um, across the board. So just to read, find a book, any book, find a magazine, just read. Thanks.