While Community High School students and staff enjoyed their traditional Opening Day Ceremony and festivities, Andrea Adams was beginning her own first day of school at Clarenceville High School in Livonia. She was getting to know a whole new crop of students just like any year, but this time around, Adams had another task in the back of her mind: that evening, she was scheduled to interview for a position teaching Foundations of Science (FOS) I and II at the school where her “ultimate teaching idol,” Robert Galardi, was a dean back in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
That school, of course, was Community High.
Adams met Galardi two schools back at her first teaching job. She was working in Detroit during a time when the district was trying to break larger schools into smaller ones with the intention of providing more streamlined pathways for students to hone in on and pursue their interests. In order to do so, school coaches (people who advise schools on how to better serve their students) — including Galardi — were hired. The project-based learning practices and general values that Galardi was aiming to instill resonated with Adams. Many of those systems stemmed from Galardi’s time at CHS, so when she saw that the FOS job had opened up, Adams went to him to discuss the possibility of applying for it.
“I was asking him what he thought as far as if Community would be a good fit for me since he knows my history and who I am as a teacher and what I’m looking for, and he told me, ‘Yeah, go for it, kid.’” Adams said. “That was the sign I needed.”
Ultimately Adams scored the job, though despite Galardi’s support and her own research, a third-week-of-the-year school move along with the culture shift that comes with becoming a rainbow zebra is an immense undertaking. She’d taught at Clarenceville for four years, but had all of two weeks to say goodbye.
It was especially strange for Adams to have begun to build relationships with her classes just to have to leave them in someone else’s hands and take on the process of getting acquainted all over again.
“At first I was kind of like, ‘Is this crazy?’” Adams said. “It was so weird to get to know my students and then pivot to a totally different place and a new way of doing things. Community as a whole was definitely a big unknown and came with a very stressful transition.”
While acclimating is still a work in progress, Adams has found her coworkers to be “amazing and supportive,” especially as a member science department, where she is surrounded by some of Community’s most veteran teachers.
Adams has experience with multiple teaching techniques that are universal at Community, but she hadn’t encountered an environment where science is taught in a way that integrates biology, earth science, chemistry and physics into a single, cohesive curriculum until this year. She believes overall instruction of the subject is evolving to be more similar to the intertwined nature that Community’s FOS curriculum teaches science to be, but that not all educators are there quite yet.
“I love the way that the program is structured,” Adams said. “The way that science education is moving is to have everything mixed together so you’re never learning a subject in isolation and you’re doing real projects and actual work. Community was doing this before it was cool and other schools are just kind of starting to turn around and do things this sort of way.”
These teaching methods align closely with Adams’ upbringing; her childhood was full of experiential science. For much of each summer, her family would travel north to Adams’ grandparents’ farm in Bellaire where Adams’ mom took it upon herself to keep the family’s gardening roots alive. When the farm was officially in operation it raised turkeys, but once her grandparents had retired it was up to Adams’ mother to get the 1942 Farmall tractor out, plow the field and plant enough food to feed the household — with plenty of leftovers for canning. Those summers, along with nights camping and plenty of time in the woods were the roots of Adams’ love for the natural world, but a high school biology teacher “sealed the deal” on it all.
Now, as Adams adjusts to life at Community, she grows produce (sans tractor) in her own garden at her own home; she’s got kale, tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers and peppers to harvest and needs to build a more robust deer fence, but she’s also learning how to use PowerSchool and a Mac computer. Becoming a Community teacher was a leap and has come with a host of uncertainties, but it will allow Adams to flex her lived experiences within the classroom — it’ll just take time to familiarize herself with the community and its systems.
“I’d been working here for three days, and I was just thinking that at the beginning of this week, I had totally different students at a totally different school, and it felt like a lifetime ago already, just three days in,” Adams said. “There’s a lot of stuff I’m still learning, of course because it has not been that long yet. It’s a different culture and a different way of doing things, but I love the fact that everybody wants to be here and everybody’s kind of on the same page. We want to be at Community.”
