Maria Samenga
Fourth Grade, Harriet Tubman Elementary School, Excellence in Teaching Award Winner 2010
“Excellence in Teaching” award winner Maria Samenga, Harriet Tubman Elementary School [Photo by James R. Brantley]
“Excellence in Teaching” award winner Maria Samenga, Harriet Tubman Elementary School [Photo by James R. Brantley]
Teacher Maria Samenga, Tubman Elementary School (Ward 1) | Photo by Dianne Bradley
Teacher Maria Samenga, Tubman Elementary School (Ward 1) | Photo by Dianne Bradley
Teacher Maria Samenga, Tubman Elementary School (Ward 1) | Photo by Dianne Bradley
DCPS teachers are our city’s true stars. On November 1, 2010, the city of Washington came together at the Kennedy Center to salute the men and women of DC Public Schools who earned the honor of being rated Highly Effective in teacher evaluations. The event was sponsored by the DC Public Education Fund.
The program featured Jim Vance as host, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Mayor Adrian Fenty, Council Chairman Vincent Gray, Thomas Friedman, David Gregory, Darrell Green, and Second Lady Jill Biden, with performances by Chrisette Michele and Dave Grohl.
Ms. Samenga was honored with one of seven “Excellence in Teaching” awards given out that night.
Ms. Samenga develops positive student relationships that create a fun and exciting classroom community. Her ability to clearly present instructional processes and goals makes her class interesting and enables students to understand higher-order questions and assignments. Ms. Samenga focuses on writing and believes that improving writing skills helps her students succeed on the DC CAS. This is her fourth year teaching in the DC Public School system and her seventh year as a teacher.
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Why did you become a teacher?
I never thought I would be a teacher. I went to college for art, and after college I moved out to Colorado to snowboard and have fun! But then I got a job teaching art (I was making my parents crazy by not using my degree). I did it to get back into art, but I fell in love with teaching. My father was a teacher and apparently—according to my parents anyway!—I have been good with kids since I was younger.
I worked with one boy who couldn’t do the monkey bars at an aftercare program once, and it was really upsetting him so I taught him how to. When he eventually he got it, and said it was because of me, he made something click for me, made me want to keep doing it and go to school, get my master’s in education and start teaching. It was there, in Boston, that I fell in love with urban education. So I guess I just found my way into teaching. I never would have thought of it myself.
Who was your favorite teacher and why?
My 6th grade teacher, Ms. Duryea. Everybody in the building was terrified of her, until you had her in class. She had a loud voice and seemed extremely strict, so I was scared at first. She was strict. But the year before I had someone very lax, and I had hated it. I was successful in her class because I knew what was expected. She made her expectations really clear, and when you did what you needed to do, you succeeded.
At one point, I had discovered something that she was wrong about. She fought me on it until I proved I was right, and she was able to admit that she had made a mistake. I hadn’t ever seen a teacher do that before; she even wrote a letter home about it praising me.
Three adjectives that describe your job:
Challenging, rewarding, different every day.
What is one thing that you wish someone had told you when you were a first year teacher?
My father told me something before he passed away…he said that you won’t be able to reach every single child. I fought hard against this and said, absolutely not, you can’t go into it that way. And I still do think you need to go in trying to help everybody and make a difference in everybody’s lives. But I have learned that if it doesn’t happen one year, it is not necessarily your fault. That was very hard for me to learn, and if I didn’t reach the student by the end of the year, felt like a failure. Sometimes the setting doesn’t work and the child is transferred to another school. I used to feel all of those as personal failures, but some of those things were not in my control. At that school we couldn’t provide what that child needed and would have been better suited somewhere.
What's one thing your students have taught you about being a better teacher?
They have increased my level of patience. I try to make kids feel comfortable around me, but they have taught me that I have to be individual with them..I have 24 different personalities and have to work with each one differently. It takes more time and effort but is so much more successful in the long run, as opposed to walking in and just treating it like a job. It makes such a difference for them, to teach 24 different personalities as they are. You are teaching differently for each of them.
Tell a little about a time when a student's accomplishments completely exceeded your expectations. Or, tell a little about a time when you were inspired by a student.
In the spring of this year, Mr. Hughes, the principal, approached me about an essay contest for 4th – 6th graders, “Global Harmony through Personal Excellence.” They had to write about a character trait that they value in themselves and others, and a time in their lives when they either exhibited that quality, or when they hadn’t and wished that they had.
In the end, four of my kids submitted essays. One was by a student who had not been in the country for very long, but he said he wanted to do it and he gave it his all.
He wrote about a friend he had lied to about money he had found. In the morning, his friend had told him he had lost 20 dollars. My student later saw $20 on the field, and on the way home, his friend was still upset. Instead of telling his friend that he’d found the $20 he suspected belonged to his friend, he told his friend, “That’s too bad.”
His friend went on to say that his main disappointment was that he had been going to use that money to buy ice cream for the both of them later in the day. Afterschool, my student went to the video game store and was standing in line, ready to buy the games, and in the store he just started to feel horrible inside. He couldn’t get past the fact that he was going to spend money that wasn’t his solely on himself, and all his friend had wanted to do with the money was to buy something for them to spend time doing something together.
So in his essay, he wrote that he looked the cashier in the eye and said he had changed his mind. He went and bought ice cream for his friend, and told his friend the truth. His friend forgave him and from that day forward they have been completely honest with each other. He decided that the feeling you get for lying to someone just isn’t worth it.
It wasn’t just his story that moved me. He had grammatical errors and really had to work on the writing, but it was so passionate. I worked with him on the writing, but it was his language and story. They were competing with kids from all over, kids on the other side of the park, so I didn’t know what he was up against. He turned it in, and a few weeks went by and I kind of forgot about it. One day a sign was outside my door congratulating him for winning 1st place!
He got to go to Sumner and read his essay, with cameras there and everything. He was nervous about his accent and reading his essay. English was not his strongest, and it inspired me that he saw it as, regardless of the fact that this is difficult, I still want to do it.
He had a story to tell. He got letters from Mrs. Obama, Oprah Winfrey, the Wizards…the recognition he got through this contest was amazing. I love seeing kids learn that the work, that taking on things that are hard for you, really pays off.
Why is teaching an incredibly important job?
Without teachers we wouldn’t have good…anything. There are some people in the field who shouldn’t be there, who don’t go into it with the passion you need.
Now that I am expecting my first child, I realize that you have 2 worlds: home and school. They are both equally important. Everything you say to a child has an impact on who they become as an adult.
All children have the ability and desire to learn, whether or not they present that when they come to your classroom. You have to find it, and that takes a passion for what you’re doing. You have to give them not just the academics but the social skills. It is an amazing responsibility to be with children all day. You have to be able to help students be comfortable with who they are so they can make improvements from where they are. You are helping them get there.
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