Between doing projects and homework, you're always busy doing something related to school. You go in hours early to study for exams and quizzes that you know you aren't prepared for. You cry in your room at night because you feel like you're never going to finish and you feel like you're always stressed about something. All of these are definite signs that you're a college student.
But here are eight signs that you're an education major:
1. Your hands are always full.
Whether you’re carrying your books for all your classes, your three 12-piece projects that you get to present that day or your binder and file box that you’ll be giving to your professor for the checkpoint on your portfolio, your hands are always full of anything and everything. Forget actually being able to carry your breakfast with manners; instead, you’re shoving down the rest of your sausage and cheese biscuit with your teeth and carrying your coffee between your thumb and ring finger.
2. You collect children's books.
You’re always scoping out the best garage sales and scanning the tables for children’s books. Even if you already have three copies of "Junie B. Jones and the Stupid, Smelly Bus," what if something happens and your book collection spontaneously combusts, you’ve got to have a backup in the car right?
3. Your crayon hoarding has gotten out of hand.
Your storage room looks like it fell out of the Crayola factory. You spend $500 each month on pieces of colored wax that are just going to get broken and be smeared into pictures on paper of things you can’t identify. Like, “Oh, that’s such a beautiful picture of an octopus. Oh, it’s me? OK.”
4. You know every word to “Baby Bumblebee.”
I’mmmm bringing home a baby…OK, I won't start. But you seriously know every word to this song and every other kids' song out there. You hear them on a daily basis, whether it be coming from your kids or you hear it on your Children’s Music Pandora station. You’re always on blast from everyone around you for singing those annoying songs.
5. You have 38 education-related boards on Pinterest.
That’s not quite an exaggeration; Pinterest is literally the love of your life. You get every idea, song, project, activity and anything else you need for class the next day from one of your boards. You are always on your computer “binge pinning” hundreds of pins about “how to make a phonics lesson from pool noodles” or “the newest classroom management techniques.”
6. You relate everything you learn to the grade level you hope to teach.
You’re sitting in your college algebra class and your professor is trying to teach you how to graph a quadratic function. However, you’re sitting there wondering what in the world a pre-k student would do with a quadratic function. Probably stick it up his nose right? Or you’re leaving your physical science class thinking, “The only thing I need to know from geology is how to keep my kids from hitting each other in the head with these rocks.”
7. No one will ever love a kid they’ve never met as much as you love your future students.
You’ve planned activities, saved empty milk cartons and dug in garbage cans for your future students. You’ve bought hundreds of dollars worth of teaching materials and games for the classroom you don’t even have yet. All this for 20 some odd kids you’ve never met and won't meet for at least another year. You feel sad for your students that won’t have a good home life, you feel excited for those moments when you see the light bulb that you’ve been working toward for weeks finally go off. You feel love for kids and pray every night before you fall asleep that you’ll make the slightest difference in their lives.
8. You wouldn’t change any of it for the world.
Your love for education can never be broken. You love the early hours and the hundreds of dollars spent that you’ll never get back. It’s all worth it to see the lives of your students be changed for the better. It’s worth it to go through 17 hours of classes per semester and not do well in some of them. It’s worth it to get up at 5 a.m. to study for a test the professor didn’t prepare you for. It’s worth the sleepless nights, the money and the tears. Making a difference will always be worth it.
