Teaching while pregnant

The challenges and highlights of Mrs. Fronda’s experience

Teaching is a hard job. It entails being in charge of a classroom full of rowdy students all day, creating and delivering engaging lessons, serving as a mentor, and committing to many other overwhelming responsibilities. For Mrs. Fronda, an AP U.S. History and English 12 teacher who is currently teaching while pregnant, her job is especially difficult.

In their day-to-day life, pregnant women often face struggles ranging from physical complications like fatigue and morning sickness to mental struggles like mood swings and anxiety. Mrs. Fronda said, “Obviously, I’m a lot more tired. Also when you’re pregnant, you have to use the bathroom all the time, so during lunchtime, I have to push students away or rush them out, which I feel bad for.”

Though the paperwork and slow-moving HR have been less than ideal, Mrs. Fronda felt supported by management at AHS. “When I had my daughter, I was in a different district, and the process is always really different. But my department head, Mrs. Smith, and the admin here have all been really helpful,” she said.

However, Mrs. Fronda is still disappointed by some of the district policies surrounding maternity leave. “I am allowed to take 6 weeks after birth and 12 weeks of child-bonding leave. But if I take all the leave this school year, I won’t move up in pay for next year, which is really sucky, cause it shouldn’t affect my pay next year.”

Mrs. Fronda’s time off also poses difficulties for her teaching plans and her students. “It is a little bit harder to plan accordingly. I have to keep in mind that I don’t know who my substitute may be and what credentials they may have. So going into semester 2, we had to get a lot of the important stuff out of the way early,” she said.

But for her students, the change is not necessarily a bad thing. Wesley Guo (12), a student in her English class, said, “I feel like we have had fewer lectures than the first semester and have had more in-class assignments, which I tend to like more as it lets me work at my own pace.”

Even while her senior English students must now do their senior projects months in advance—with presentations scheduled in mid-February—Guo was optimistic. He said, “This means we will have to figure out how to do this relatively quickly, but we can also get it out of the way early and won’t have to worry about it later on.”

Through all this, Mrs. Fronda has found support from her students. She said, “My students have been really chill. When I was pregnant the first time, I was teaching predominantly freshmen, so they were super high energy and really kept me on my toes—which was rough. This time around with seniors is probably the best class I’ve ever had in terms of discipline.”

She was especially surprised by the attentiveness of her students and the bonding experience her pregnancy offered. “My students have been really caring, asking me a lot of questions about how I’m doing and being really empathetic about how I’m more low-energy,” she said. “I feel like they’re super excited for me, and I’ve learned how much of a connection I can have with them even though this is something they probably can’t really relate to.”