‘An agent of change’
Elizabeth M. Miller
Elizabeth M. Miller, a former Young Observer, teaches at Chicago Academy High School.
If someone would have asked Elizabeth M. Miller 10 years ago if she would be teaching kids at a Chicago public school, she would have told them no. But Miller, a teacher at Chicago Academy High School, teaches ninth-, 10th- and 12th-grade English and reading to kids at an inner-city school.
Miller, a former Young Observer, graduated from Washington High School in 2003 and attended Wooster College, where she majored in English and sociology. After college, she moved out West to spend some time in Seattle, Wash., and taught computer classes. That’s when she realized she might like to become a teacher.
“I was always the kind of person who was never comfortable in one place until I got to Chicago,” Miller said. “(It’s) a place I can be happy and work to be an agent of change.”
Miller received a full year of teacher training under a mentor in Chicago through the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL), and through her affiliation with AUSL she was able to find a job at the school where she now teaches.
Chicago has the nation’s third-largest school district, according to Miller, with hundreds of elementary schools and high schools. And though the schools do face problems, she said those problems are the same any other urban area will face.
“Our students are overwhelmingly a student of poverty,” she said, “(but) it’s not fair to generalize – a lot makes it great.”
Miller starts her day at school at 6:30 every morning, and some days she works as long as 12 hours, on top of what she does at home. “Teaching is my life,” she said, “and I’m OK with that, but sometimes that time crunch can be overwhelming.”
Despite the time crunch, Miller finds helping her students to be rewarding work. One of the young men she taught really struggled his sophomore year, Miller recalls, and she didn’t really see him much his junior year, but he turned it around and really applied himself his senior year. “Seeing students become better versions of themselves makes this job incredibly rewarding,” she said.
Miller co-teaches all of her classes. And with two teachers, she said, you can do phenomenal things. To keep the students engaged, Miller plans with the students in mind and tries to tap into their interests. To do that, she may introduce a new subject with a video clip or song. “We look for ways to make it thematically relevant,” she said.
After teaching for a while, Miller applied to a program called the Yale National Initiative to Strengthen Teaching in Public Schools. The program allows teachers to go to Yale and spend time in a session with a seminar teacher, where they are engaged in content-area learning. Then, the teachers write units and share them on a website so teachers across the country can have access to the plans. Miller was accepted into the program, and now she is considered a Yale Fellow.
Miller doesn’t thinking she’ll ever leave the field of education. “I teach kids, and kids are the same in Washington, Pa., as they are in Chicago, Ill.,” she said. “(When) I think about the teachers I had, I see myself using strategies that some of my teachers used.”