The idea of being a teacher did not come to me until my younger brother was born. I was only 3 when he was born, but I felt like he was my responsibility. I felt that I was the one to take care of him and to make sure he was OK. As he got older, I began to help him learn words and simple counting. It felt good knowing that I helped him learn something, even if it was just learning the word “hi.”
I took that love of helping him learn something into my school. When I was in the third grade, my teacher offered me an opportunity to tutor a girl in the second grade. I was to help her learn simple multiplication for a test coming up. I jumped at the opportunity to teach someone something.
That little girl was my first step in teaching a student something when she obviously did not like the situation. I had a hard time getting her to listen and study with me. Eventually, she came around, and I was able to succeed in helping her, and she ended up passing the test with a really high score. I know now that she probably had more help from her parents or her teacher, but at the time, I felt I was the one to help her. It felt really good!
That feeling stayed with me as I changed schools and became a peer tutor for my classmates in English and math. When I was in high school, I was a teacher’s aide for my Catholic Church’s religion education classes. In ninth grade, I was put on as an acting substitute for when teachers were running late or couldn’t make it at the last minute. Eventually, I became the second and, occasionally, the first grade teacher.
That volunteer job was the stepping stone to understanding what I really wanted to be when I grew up. I could not see myself doing anything else. Teaching is a passion to me, and I don’t know what I would be doing if I didn’t discover it. I did not know what grade level would be perfect for me, however. I did have experience teaching younger grades, but not higher grades, like middle and high school.
At my religion classes, the grades went from first to eighth grades. I told my instructor that I wanted to gain some experience teaching the older grades because of my desired career path. I immediately knew that teaching older grades was not for me. The students were taller and not that much younger than I was. My philosophy is that if a student is taller and only slightly younger than me, then he/she should not be listening to me (and most of them didn't).
Of course, choosing this career path as given me the oh-so-pleasant gift of other people’s opinions. Even my own family have told me time and time again that being a teacher is not going to pay the bills, guarantee me a job, require me to move out of state and isn’t a challenging enough job. What people don’t seem to understand is that I don’t want to teach for the money or having to move out of state. I want to teach for the kids.
I love being around kids and watching them as they learn something new. I also know that I want to be the one who helps them discover something new about the world and themselves. If it were not for teachers and professors, the world would not have enough experience to do the jobs they want to do. As I head into my second year of college, I know that I want to be a teacher for the rest of my life. So, let me be the person I want to be and let me teach the future generations of this world.
