Hannah Moon hadn't initially planned on being a teacher — but it's become her calling.
“I feel like I didn't think I wanted to do this when I came into it. I really didn't. I thought I was going to be a doctor or anything else, but education is my calling. I love coming to school every day. I'm a realist. I know there's good and bad, but the kids are amazing,” she said.
Moon said that one of the biggest lessons she wants to impart to beginning teachers is that change is inevitable in the profession.
“There's going to be new acronyms; there's going to be new administration; there's going to be new peers, new educational referendums, whatever it is. So I feel like, if teachers can be flexible and just always know what your end goal is, ‘Why are you here in education?’ For me, it's to make the world a better place through 100 students a semester,” she said.
The content
Moon wants her English class students to learn to read between the lines.
“So when I see those words, I need to be able to think critically and analyze those," she said, adding that she wants students to ask questions like, "What is true about these? What is not true? How can I bring my own opinion and my own life into these?”
She’s feeling the pressure from the community on things like book selections. She says she’s always made exceptions if parents object to an assigned text, and now she makes sure that a letter goes home to inform them about what their kids will be reading.
“I like to tell parents and students that literature has been around forever, and things that make us uncomfortable make us think," she said. "We don't have to agree, but they make us think, and they make us have empathy for others who are not like us.”
She added that it is “scary” sometimes: “Are we going to get a hate email from a parent that says that I'm trying to indoctrinate [students] with whatever it is? And, of course, the answer is no; I'm just trying to teach good books.”
While facing this reality, Moon said she enjoys teaching Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — and this year, she read Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead with her AP Literature students.
“They saw this young boy in rural Alabama who was abused and neglected and an addict and all of the scary things, and they came out of this book with, ‘Wow, people are just people, and people want to be loved, and people just want to be respected and feel like they fit in,'" she said.
As for Frankenstein, “Here's Mary Shelley at 18 years old, talking about a man who will try to make a human being. Should doctors play God, and what's the God complex with someone?”
Moon also connects literature to her students’ life experiences.
“And right now, my students are reading Romantic literature, and on Monday, we're going to go outside, and they're going to write their own pieces about nature and loss and change and adaptation and how great for seniors who are about to leave the nest of their parents home and be able to reflect upon that as they look outside at our trees and our grass," she said.
On cellphones, AI
Moon is also concerned about her students’ attention spans. She and her colleagues have ditched lessons that worked twenty years ago because students do better with smaller increments, like 20-minute chunks of a task during an 80-minute block.
A likely culprit for this attention deficit is the infamous cellphones — especially smartphones, with access to the internet and a host of apps — although she said she does build small segments of time for the students to use them during the block, “but they are obsessed.”
Moon said the kids always have to know what’s going on in their online social life. “I tried to tell them nobody had cell phones when I was in high school, and I'm fine. My mom would call and check me out."
Students then ask her: "‘Ms. Moon: how do you know it was going on?’" And she responds, "'I didn't, and you know what I found out after class, and I'm just fine with that.' It's really sad, in a way. The kids are just looking at their phones and not reaching out to their peers.”
But when Moon recently took them to see the film Fanny’s Journey about the Holocaust at the Wilson Center, she gathered up all the phones. She said they were fine and loved it.
She also said she has to tell her students to put their phones away when interacting with adults, which include teachers and their peers.
“I would never be on my phone when you need to talk to me. I'm looking at you in the eye. I'm giving you my attention. I'm showing you that I'm interested. So when we're talking about a lesson, Frankenstein, poetry, whatever, when you're looking at your phone, it's disrespectful. You're showing me that you don't care. So let's have a mutual respect,” she said.
The school has signaled an interest in taking up the cell phone issue. In August, they looked at a proposal for cell phone pouches, but it’s expensive. Buying the Yondr locking cell phone bags for all K-12 students would cost around $600,000. The district, she feels, is already strapped for cash. At the September agenda review meeting, the board heard from current and former students and a UNCW professor, Elham Ebrahimi, about an app called ‘LookUpp’ that would reward students for not using their phones. Interim superintendent Dr. Christopher Barnes said he would talk with principals to see who was interested in piloting the app.
Moon said she didn’t know how well that would work — the reward “would have to be pretty good for them to care.”
Along with cell phones, she said another challenge in 21st-century teaching is the rise of AI. She said she makes the students handwrite most of their assignments to ensure they gain the necessary skills. She acknowledged that AI has a place, but the students must still write a cogent argument or essay organically. Furthermore, Moon said Laney no longer had the funds to purchase turnitin.com, a website where students submit papers to check for plagiarism. Since she lost that resource, there has been more handwriting work.
Keeping teachers in the profession
While her students motivate her, she’s concerned about the increasing teacher attrition rate. It was about 12% in New Hanover County last year.
“And people say, ‘Well, why are teachers leaving education?’ Or people ask me, ‘Why are you staying in education?’ Teachers don't make enough money. It is true. We're doing okay, but we don't make enough money," she said.
Moon said that the state needs to prioritize this because it is their responsibility more than that of county officials. She also wants to see Master’s pay reinstated.
In this year’s school budget, 60% came from the state, 30% from the county, and about 8% from federal funding. The remainder came from other sources, like food sales.
In 2023, reinstating higher pay for teachers with Master's degrees was proposed in the House budget but dropped by the Senate. North Carolina Senator Michael Lee is the education and appropriations/budget committee chairman. He previously told WHQR in 2021 that the National Board’s Certification (NBC) is better for teachers to access a pay increase than Master’s pay. Moon does have a Master’s degree and her NBC.
“[Pay] is number one [priority]. And the second one, I feel like, is respect locally, with our parents, with our school board, within our own schools. We are professionals. We have numerous degrees," she said. "We have so much experience. In what private sector is ‘jeans day’ a reward for staying in education?”
There’s one more important thing for Moon: Time.
“My plate is so full, there's a million piles, my email, my to-do list is so long that sometimes it's hard just to teach, and it's really kind of sad because that's why I think most teachers aren't in it. I love teaching literature. My husband loves teaching history and current events, but with all the meetings, data, testing, and things we have to do. It's just really hard to do; I'm not saying they need to lighten our loads, but they need to respect our loads and don't give us more to do,” she said.
Moon tells beginning teachers to leave work at work — and to go home to spend time with their friends and families or do something that makes them happy.
