At the end of my sophomore year of high school, I started work as the director of my high school speech and debate team's middle school program, which put together public speaking workshops and clubs for middle schoolers. When I started with the program, our involvement in the local schools was still relatively small. We worked with about 30 students from each of three different middle schools in San Jose and another 30 from an after-school program made up of students from more than 10 different middle schools. One Saturday in May, we were responsible for putting together a middle school speech and debate tournament. I planned for the middle school program to unfold as a two-day-a-week commitment -- maybe three at most -- if I was to balance it with my other activities. But teaching speech to these middle schoolers who represented such a wide range of backgrounds and abilities quickly became the highlight of my week, and I spent many hours writing and rewriting my lessons. Not a day went by when I wasn't either working with my students or thinking about them.
It wasn't long before I started to receive emails from current and former students telling me that speech had helped them deliver a presentation in their English and biology and history classes; that it had made them more confident when meeting with new people; and that it had helped them deliver their middle school valedictory speeches. But the spring of my senior year approached much faster than I could have imagined. The program looked entirely different that May than it did two years earlier. One tournament had blossomed into two tournaments, the first of which was a "warm up" for the second. There were hundreds of speech students at each of the schools we coached, most of whom were members of the National Junior Forensic League, a speech and debate honor society for middle schoolers. Over 300 middle school students from as far away as Los Angeles attended our tournament, along with 200 high school judges and 50 teachers and coaches.
But before I knew it, I was writing, then teaching my last lesson at each school I went to; sending my last email to the students' parents; saying goodbye to the students themselves; and presenting the awards at the last tournament I hosted. There were many "lasts" in my final month of May -- last class, last exam, last lunchtime -- but the most meaningful to me were those with my middle school students. It wasn't until I stood on stage in front of those 550 people and announced that the fourth annual Burnett Middle School speech and debate tournament was over, and that I hoped to see everyone back next year, that I realized that I would not, in fact, be seeing everyone next year. I had invested so much time and energy in the middle school program, and watched it grow and thrive, that it was hard to believe that I was stepping away.
I've been following what's been happening with the middle school program since I graduated. The students who took my place are already contributing their exciting ideas -- differentiating instruction between grade levels, expanding the program to a local elementary school, writing and distributing lessons to schools across the nation, to name a few. It may not be the same as being there myself, but I'm looking forward to watching the program continue to expand in new directions.