 My name is Ali Kronik and I'm an 11th grade academic literacy and reading teacher here at Oakland International High School and I've been teaching here for two years. Oakland International High School is a school for recently arrived immigrants and so we serve students from over 30 countries in over 20 different languages. There are lots of things I love about working here at Oakland International. I love working with high school students, although there are many challenges with that age. I think it's the time in their lives when they're starting to think critically about the world around them and so my favorite part is engaging them in conversations that make them think a little bit differently or outside of the box. Our students come from all over Oakland, a lot from East Oakland and Fruitvale and West Oakland and the bus system changed this year and we lost the bus line that most of our students take. And so instead of taking 30 minutes on the rapid line, it now takes them over an hour to get to school and so just the ability to get to school is a challenge for a lot of our students. The students here are still high school students and they're still teenagers and so some of the challenges that they have in addition to family and transportation are just being a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old and fighting with their boyfriend or having a crush and not knowing what to do. And so they still have all the emotional volatility that high school students have. I think one of the biggest issues that staff deal with is just workload. Because there are so many different student needs in a classroom, be it language or level of English and ability, we are always working to try to scaffold the material so that every student can engage in the material regardless of their language ability or where they come from or how much school they had. As teachers, the work that we do is not just the lesson planning and the grading but really making sure that the emotional well-being of all of our students is there so that they can learn. And as teachers, we're interacting with students who come to us with a tremendous amount of trauma and we do not know what kind of secondary trauma we are getting from our interactions every day with students but we know it's there and we feel it at the end of the day. And the mental health resources that the students receive, which are plentiful at our school, I think as teachers we also need to have resources and mental health resources for ourselves so that we can continue doing this work beyond one year and two years. I identify as queer and part of the LGBT community and one of the things that I see as a teacher, especially working at our school here in Oakland, although the climate in Oakland is very positive and very open to our queer friends, I, as a teacher, am confronted with students who come from countries where their understanding of what it means to be gay or be transgender or be gender non-conforming is very different and so last year one of the units of study was all about, it was about writing and how writing can be healing and so we started the unit looking at post secrets and secrets that people had written and then we moved into looking at letters that different authors and writers had written to their former selves and looking at that as a tool for healing and the authors were different queer writers and so one of my students with her curiosity was like why are we doing this? And so in class she, I think I had a little bit more emotion attached to it and so when she asked me it was embedded with some homophobia and it was first thing in the morning and I did not know how to respond and so I was in front of the class with 20 other students and this student who had said something homophobic and she might not have even known that what she said was homophobic but it touched me in a very personal way and yet I had to respond professionally and I didn't know how to do that. There was no teacher training about how to respond in moments like that and so I ended up having a conversation with one of the coaches at our school to include her in the conversation with the student so that I felt safe going back into the classroom and that also the student's voice was heard. One of the other things that I think makes this such a supportive place for teachers to work is that it's really modeled by our administration. We see from our administrators the value of working together and collaboratively. The little things that they do like quarterly massages and lunches for the staff show that they are thinking about us and care about all the work that we do in those little ways and build in this idea that we are all here to support and work together for the same common goal.