“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A first-grade teacher.”
That’s the exact conversation I’ve had every time someone has asked what I want to be since I was in first grade. My classmates in elementary school wanted to be astronauts and surgeons, jobs that provided a large paycheck so they could buy fancy cars and houses like in movies. I never wanted a mansion in Washington D.C or a penthouse in New York City. I want to help kids learn how to count and read sight words.
I’ve never been ashamed of wanting to be a teacher; the money doesn’t bother me, the prospect of long unappreciated hours grading and writing lesson plans doesn’t bother me, the difficult students that I will inevitably encounter don’t scare me.
So many high school students have no idea what they want to do for the rest of their lives. When you are a freshman, you are 14 years old. Going to college seems a million years away and graduating and trying to find a job even longer.
Now, it’s here. It’s real. I’m in college. I’ve been waiting for 13 years to become a teacher and I’m finally on my way there, I’m in my first EDU Education class now, in my first semester of college.
Getting your teaching license is a very particular process, where you need to take certain classes certain semesters. It is daunting thinking about how many classes I will need to take before I do a semester of student teaching. But then I think about how after student teaching I finally will get to do what I’ve been waiting to do for as long as I can remember.
People say it’s normal not to know what you want to do and to switch your major multiple times while you’re in college. I think it makes people uncomfortable when I say that I’ve known for almost ¾ of my life what I’ve wanted to be when I grow up.
It’s not normal, it makes people feel like they are behind. But they don’t realize that I didn’t decide that I wanted to be a teacher, it was a decision that made me. Me wanting to be a teacher is as natural as the leaves changing colors in October.
Adults sound like they’ve come up with a revolutionary idea when they tell me I should be a teacher. They see me answering a little girl at the dance studios question, and say, “Hey, have you ever thought about being a teacher?”
They see me playing with children I just met and say, “You get kids really well, what about majoring in education?” They see me volunteering at church, dealing with one meltdown while holding another little kid that cries when I put them down and say, “Wow, you stay really calm in stressful situations, you would do well managing a classroom”
When I tell them my plan they smile because they see that being a teacher is perfect for me. I couldn’t come up with any other job that would make me anywhere near as happy as being a teacher will make me.
