By Cricket Desmarais
“Idle hands, I don’t like them. I like to stay busy,” says Kyla Shoemaker, who is far from idle.
She volunteers at the Key West Police Department’s horse barn at Truman Waterfront and walks dogs for the Florida Keys SPCA in addition to tending to her own two young lab mix rescues, River Grace and Costa Bean. She founded and runs the Southernmost Jeep Club and teaches paddleboard yoga every Sunday. But she stays busiest at Key West High School, where she has taught English for eight years, influencing and inspiring 10th graders.
Like many others, Shoemaker came to Key West on vacation from Charlotte, North Carolina, where she’d earned her paddleboard yoga teacher certification. She was “celebrating quitting” her job and realized she could teach here. Three weeks later, she was at a new teacher orientation for Key West High School. That was July 2014. Prior to this, she worked in a maximum-security juvenile detention facility as a corrections officer. Unable to find a teaching job out of college in Pennsylvania due to a hiring freeze, Shoemaker moved forward on a friend’s lead who said they worked with kids.
“She didn’t tell me what I would be doing until I drove up. There was this two-story, double barbed wire fence. … They hired me on the spot. I started right after that and was there for almost seven years,” she recalled.
Oddly, that job would prepare her as a teacher who has made a mark on her kids and on the district’s curriculum, which now includes a book Shoemaker credits with reaching the most reluctant readers and writers.
“‘Freedom Writers’ is a book about kids putting down guns and fists and picking up a pen and writing their story,” she says. (Hilary Swank later starred in a movie about the California teacher, Erin Gruwell, who used writing to reach — and liberate — students at an inner-city high school.)
“When I got here I realized there are kids who are reluctant readers and writers who connect to things like this — in a place where you don’t expect it,” she said. “The poverty level here is a lot more than people realize. We also have a lot of things, as far as substances, that are readily available. Unfortunately, students have the same ability to get those things, whether it be in their house or just walking down the streets.”
When she incorporated the “Freedom Writers” book into her English classes, Shoemaker had kids coming to class who would skip all day, but show up to hers to read this book.
“Kids who didn’t do work all year, or never finished a book, were reading ahead,” she said.
With a bit of research, she found a teacher’s edition of activities and an opportunity to hire Erin Gruwell to speak to her Key West classes. Using the book’s “jar in front of the classroom” method, Shoemaker and her students raised half the money for Gruwell’s fee, and principal Amber Acevedo approved the expenditure for the other half.
“These were students who weren’t financially well off and didn’t really even like school, and yet they were bringing in change and dollar bills and whatever to video chat with that teacher.”
Shoemaker is one of 800 teachers who’ve gone through the Freedom Writers program, and one of 12 from around the world who make up the “Kitchen Cabinet for the Freedom Writers Foundation,” adapting the materials for online teaching.
“And because of my connections with the Freedom Writers project, I got a full scholarship for my master’s of education in social & emotional learning at Waldorf University,” Shoemaker said. “I just found out last week.”
She still keeps it old-school in her classes as well. Her students are required to write in a daily journal at the start of every class, sharing their innermost thoughts, despite knowing the journal would be read later. (That’s how Gruwell’s Freedom Writers project initially started as well.)
“You just keep telling them to do it. And now they walk in and they get it and it’s sitting on their desk when I’m ready to start. Kids who weren’t coming or were coming 15, 20 minutes late to class are showing up on time. And they’re writing. And reading out loud.”
“When students tell you that’s the favorite part of their school year — or two years later, they’re still talking about that time they got to video chat with Erin Gruwell, the teacher from the original Freedom Writers, or when you see them four or five years later, and they ask, “Are you still teaching that book?’ Yeah, as a teacher, you don’t stop doing something like that.”
Quick Q & A with Kyla Shoemaker:
Favorite book: This is a hard question for an English teacher, but I’d say “The Freedom Writers Diary” because it has changed my life and made me the teacher I am.
Something you’d like to learn: Another language, probably Spanish or Italian. I took 5 years of German and was once very fluent, but it was not so useful and I’ve forgotten a lot of it.
Funniest thing a student has ever said or asked you: When they accidentally call me mom, it always makes me laugh (especially when it happens with a high schooler). Students say and ask a lot of funny things daily.
What’s your superpower? I speak things into existence. Many of my close friends can attest to this. I say things and they seem to happen. (Although I’ve yet to speak into existence winning the lottery or finding a good guy … lol)Words to live by: Live. Love. That’s all.
