Starting a teaching career fresh out of college can be exciting and scary, especially when the age difference between teachers and students is relatively small. The Black & White talked to three of Whitman’s youngest teachers, who shared their experiences going straight from behind a college desk to the front of a high school classroom.

Tyler Wilkinson, Math

Tyler Wilkinson started teaching math at Whitman the fall after his graduation from Salisbury University in 2012.

He feels confident in front of his students and has enjoyed teaching since the beginning, he said.

“I was nervous but more excited,” he said, looking back on his first day in the classroom.

Wilkinson feels being close in age to his students allows him to better connect with them.

“It’s not weird because when I’m teaching, I feel like an authority figure,” he said. “I kind of have dual personalities. I can be teacher Mr. Wilkinson and non-teacher Mr. Wilkinson.”

Last year, Wilkinson’s parents couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea of their son teaching kids their daughter’s age. His friends, too, are baffled that he teaches classes they took only a few years earlier, he said.

Wilkinson looks up to each member of the math department as a mentor, but as the runt of the pack, he receives his fair share of teasing.

“I was thinking I was going to come into the adult world and everyone was going to be adults,” Wilkinson said, as his coworker David Paulson mocked and teased him over his shoulder. “One of the biggest surprises is that adults are still kids.”

Fun Fact: Wilkinson was once a security guard at Best Buy, one of seven jobs he’s held in his life.

Emily Glass, English

Emily Glass moved to Hawaii right after graduating from Bloomsburg University, and while the weather was paradise, her job teaching at an underprivileged school wasn’t.

“It was a pretty rocky first year teaching,” she said. “Being fresh out of college I was very eager. I wanted to use all the methods and strategies I’d learned. Any issue I could’ve encountered my first year teaching, I encountered.”

After the disappointing Hawaiian excursion, Glass felt defeated and battered.

“I kind of questioned whether I wanted to keep teaching,” she said.

After a year at a different job in Colorado, Glass decided she wanted to go back to teaching. She worked as a substitute teacher in Pennsylvania before moving to Montgomery County, where she taught at Springbrook until 2010, when she switched to Whitman.

As a young teacher, she has struggled to maintain the firm control in her classroom she has today.

“I feel like sometimes, students questioned my authority and mistakenly viewed me as a friend,” she said. “I worked really hard to establish that boundary. Now I feel like it’s not as much of an issue.”

Glass feels that being young gives her an advantage in incorporating modern culture and technology into her classroom.

“I try as much as I can to incorporate aspects of culture today so activities are more relatable,” Glass said.

Fun fact: Glass is a vegetarian.

Daniel Chen, Physics

Daniel Chen’s goal is to prepare students for the unknown, but he’s not a guidance counselor — he’s a second-year physics teacher.

“Junior year in college, when I did an internship as a teacher, I saw the lack of understanding in the students about physics and the static way they were learning it, he said. “It gave me a passion to seek a way to have people really learn how to think about physics. The way you approach physics is very similar to how you approach the unknown in life.”

Chen graduated from the University of Maryland and came straight to Whitman at the start of school last year.

The small age difference between him and his students allows him to forge closer bonds with them and relate more easily.

“Its easier to understand the struggles of the students,” he said.
However, the comfort level in the classroom is a little too high for his liking.

“It always takes a little longer to get everyone’s attention,” he said. “ I need to find different ways to get respect from students.”

Despite the hiccups, Chen enjoys his time with his students and likes when they can share a laugh. In a memorable incident last year, he placed a fan in the window to cool off his room, but halfway through second period, he heard a noise and looked over to see that the fan had fallen and exploded in the courtyard three stories below.

Fun Fact: Chen likes to point out incorrect science references in movies and songs.