Creating A SafE SPacE A profile on Jared Darby
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do you help a student who is affiliated with a gang, has run from the cops while under the influence of alcohol, is on probation, and has a majority of his family in jail? You befriend him. Jared Darby has firsthand experience with this exact scenario. While student teaching at a
school in Sacramento, Darby first met a fourteen-year-old freshman who was, at that time, getting free gang tattoo removal through his probation. This student realized he didn’t want to follow the same path as his family members and had connected with Darby and a couple of other teachers because of the kind of positivity they brought. They were all united through one thing they all did, long-distance running. The teacher Darby was working under was recruiting students to sign up for a marathon. Darby had never run
by Manny Rodriguez
a marathon but he was up for the challenge. The student signed up as well. Darby started doing training runs, and the student would join in. The student would hang out in the classroom every day during lunch and they would chat about positive life, fun things, and many other things. When the day of the marathon finally came, “fifty-five students, the principal and seven teachers ran a marathon in Sacramento� (Darby). Darby ran all 26.2 miles of the marathon with that student and another teacher, talking the whole time. A few years
back, although he was no longer teaching at the same school, Darby went back to visit the student and found that he was still attending classes, staying positive, and keeping away from all drugs and alcohol. This story is an extraordinary example of how befriending a student and providing him with an environment he can be comfortable in can help him out of a terrible situation. It also shows that providing a good community for your students can be hard, even as difficult as running a marathon, but Darby is always up to the task. Jared Darby is a teacher at Mountain View High School, a volunteer at many non-profit organizations, and a man of many hobbies. He has a special way of teaching, believing that community is the most important factor in student learning. Even though he is very knowledgeable in his discipline, he believes that commu-
nity comes first: “You don’t need discipline if you have a good community.” According to Schoolwires, an educational website,
the responsibility for ensuring the educational environment is free from harmful elements, whether on the playground, in the classroom, or online” (“Creating a safe social learning environment”). The article also explains that community is necessary: “It is well accepted that collaboration and interaction strengthen learning outcomes, and social networking creates participatory environments.” Darby has a few ways that he tries to build community in his classes. First is a simple thing that many teachers do: community building activities. He also tries to always have an open door, and gives his students a safe space to talk and he says when you do this, “It’s amazing what they would say” (Darby). He explains, “ from there on out, you provide a space that a student wants to be present in, and then they learn, it just kind of happens” (Darby). Finally, he is very honest with his students. He
“You don’t need discipline if you have a good community.” Jared Darby
this teaching philosophy is very difficult to put into practice: “The challenge is to create a social learning environment that is safe and transparent as well as engaging. Administrators bear
explains that life is hard, and you have to work hard to succeed and to do what you want to in life. Even outside of teaching Darby loves to help people, and one way he does this is through volunteering at a number of non-profit organizations. He volunteers at many locations for a variety of different things. He helps out with the special olympics, an educational program called ALearn that works with the MVLA school district. He enjoys many volunteer and donation-based activities. And although he has a very busy schedule with teaching and volunteering, he always has makes time for his hobbies. Darby loves camping, wakeboarding, woodworking, gardening, long-distance running, and especially wine tasting with his wife. Darby has showed how his hard work in the past has payed off, through allowing him to enjoy life through the
many hobbies he has. Growing up in Sacramento as part of a pretty poor family, Darby did not have an easy path to success, and the journey he took was pretty extraordinary. You
could even compare the path he took to running a marathon. He was oblivious to the many options of college he had, so he decided
to take the junior college route, but in the end decided to skip college altogether. He worked at a ski resort at Sierra Tahoe, snowboarding for 2 years. He then went back to Sacramento, to study at American River Community College, slowly trying to figure out how to start again. Darby spent about three years there, getting motivated by finding what he wanted to do, and ended up transferring to Cal State University of Monterey. There he had finally found a community that was supportive of his interests. He transferred as an undecided major, but soon switched to a mathematics major, and focused on pure mathematics. Towards the end of college he had no idea what he was going to do with a mathematics major. He sought career advice from a manager at an insurance company, on an online post in January of that year, but didn’t receive a
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response until June. The manager said that he had expected Darby to have graduated by then and asked for his résumé. Darby created a résumé for the first time, sent it to the manager, went in for an interview four days later and landed a job on the spot. Five weeks out of school and he already had a job as an actuary, a well-paying and top rated job, and one he had never even heard of before. He had planned to work there, get rich, and then retire and go teach, but his plan was soon hindered when, after the course of two years, he realized that he was not built for a desk job. Darby explains, “I wasn’t built for the commercial world, sitting at a desk and all these dif-
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job with nothing to fall back on. Two years later Darby graduated from Sacramento State. Got a job teaching at Vacaville High School, which was a much different school from MVHS. Low resources, good school climate, but much different population. Due to low resources they pink-slipped every single first and second year teacher. He was eventually was offered his job back when they got funding, but had already accepted a position at MVHS. Kind of a wild journey. Being a teacher at MVHS, Darby has to deal with many communit y - related challenges. One example is how he has to deal with the disparity be-
ferent things, I was really realizing that helping people is what I liked to do.” His story was very similar to the one John Owen tells of his life in his book Confessions of a Bad Teacher, where he explains, “I had come to the South Bronx with good intentions and the hope of ‘making a difference.’ I had voluntarily traded an office in a Manhattan skyscraper for firstyear-teacher pay and a sweltering hot classroom on the third floor of a former elementary school that shared the street with a hospital and a jail” (10). They had both quit well paying office jobs to go teach because they wanted to help and make a difference in the world. Now that he had realized he want- i s ed to teach, Darby applied to Grad School, and when he was accepted he quit
“He just kind of motivated me to not be afraid...’ Sumukh Vaze
tween some of his students. Although MVHS is a school in a city that is very wealthy, there still a big separation of wealth between some students. Marcey Winawer, a fellow math teacher at MVHS, explains how Darby helps kids understand that background h i s doesn’t matter when she says,
“he’s able to share his upbringing, he has a very humble background. So I know he’s brought that into the classroom to help kids understand that you can be successful no matter where you came from and that we should all respect each other for who we are.” She also explains a situation in which one student made a comment that offended another student, and explained that Darby had to talk to him to make sure he was not making the class uncomfortable for anyone. Darby wanted to make sure that everyone had a good class community, because he truly believes it will help his students. Jared Darby is very passionate about helping people, so he obviously has many stories of people he has helped. Sumukh Vaze, for instance, had recently moved from India, when he first met Darby, his freshman year in an Algebra 2 class. He was not only new to Mountain View, but to the whole country. He had a bit of trouble speaking English when he first moved here, and was a very shy person. The math Sumukh was learning at MVHS was a bit new to him, and he needed some help with graphing, so he went to Darby’s classroom almost every day during 7th period to get some help. He found that Darby provided an open and safe space that he could hang out in, saying “He just kind of motivated me to not be afraid, because when I first moved here, I was very shy and I was pretty afraid of talking to others because I wasn’t a very good English speaker, and I used to hang out in Mr. Darby’s room after school. That’s how he just kind of started inspiring me to talk to more people and make friends.” Darby helped Sumukh break out of his shell and to stop being so
shy, and even helped motivate him to make friends. Clearly, Darby helped Sumukh by providing an open and welcoming space, and he was not only able to learn math, but was able to overcome his shyness and make new friends. Jared Darby has a few plans for the near future, including remaining at MVHS: “Absolutely, I’m going to continue teaching here as long as I have passion for teaching and I believe the school is truly supporting the kids, and that
all about the kids, which is a beautiful thing.” He also plans to, if even possible, continue to expand the many ways in which he is able to reach and help people in need. FiJared Darby nally, because his honeymoon was cancelled after he cut his finger with a table saw in May, he is looking forward to taking his honeymoon this summer with his wife. Also, although he hasn’t planned anything else in the near future, he explains, “Every year I feel there’s a new door
“Every year I feel there’s a new door open, I don’t know what it is next year.”
is absolutely 100% true on both open, I don’t know what it is next ends right now. My passion is very year” (Darby). high, and this school absolutely, the teachers here, the admin, the 5 resources that are provided, are
Works Cited “Creating a safe social learning environment to improve student success.” Internet@Schools Nov.-Dec. 2013: 8+. Student Resources in Context. Web. 18 Oct. 2015. Darby, Jared. Personal interview. 16 October 2015. Darby, Jared. Personal interview. 28 September 2015. Lau, Linda K. “Institutional factors affecting student retention.” Education 124.1 (2003): 126+. Student Resources in Context. Web. 18 Oct. 2015. “Lifers: why good teachers still love teaching.” Age [Melbourne, Australia] 20 July 2015: 14. Student Resources in Context. Web. 18 Oct. 2015. Owens, John. Confessions of a Bad Teacher: The Shocking Truth from the Front Lines of American Public Education. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print. “Teachers.” American Decades. Ed. Judith S. Baughman, et al. Vol. 6: 1950-1959. Detroit: Gale, 2001. 135-137. Student Resources in Context. Web. 18 Oct. 2015. “The Greatest Problem With Maths Are Bad Teachers - Prof. Garba [interview].” Africa News Service 24 Apr. 2015. Student Resources in Context. Web. 18 Oct. 2015. Vaze, Sumukh. Personal interview. 9 October 2015. Winawer, Marcey. Personal interview. 8 October 2015.
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