“I always knew that I was going to become a teacher.”
This is something that I hear from almost every classmate--most of the time, all girls-- in my education classes. Her mom was a teacher, or she had a teacher who changed her outlook on life.
My mom is a nurse. I’ve considered this career, but nurses are truly on a whole different level as far as what kind of stress they can handle.
My mom is my hero. When I was growing up she took so many nights on call when I’m sure she would have rather spent at home. If I meet someone who is a nurse, I instantly love them because, in my mind, all nurses resonate the same hue of compassion.
Nurses make everyone feel safe.
But that’s not my path -- I barely passed human anatomy.
And I’ve had many fantastic teachers throughout my life. I wouldn’t be where I am in life if it weren’t for the patience, dedication, and intelligence of all of my teachers.
But I can’t honestly say that there’s one person in particular who inspired me to teach.
When I was little, I wanted to be many different things: first, a dolphin trainer, then Britney Spears, then a professional basketball player until 8th grade, when I discovered that despite my dad’s best efforts to convince me that I was the female version of Allen Iverson, I was not even high school team material.
In high school, I had no concept of what a real career entailed or what was even possible. I just wanted to play my guitar and drive around with my friends.
College hit, and I was not ready, both emotionally and intellectually.
The thought of living away from my parents had me absolutely terrified. Mental illness was just beginning to seep its way into my life and I had no idea how to handle it.
Even at my community college, I struggled to adjust. For the first time in my life, I felt lost even though I was sleeping in the same bed that gave me shelter during high school.
After 3 years of bouncing from major to major, my dad pushed me to graduate from community college. I had to make a decision about my life, and I was seriously scared of messing up.
The only thing that I knew that made me happy was writing. The summer before I graduated, I began to write lyrics to rap instrumentals off of Youtube. This led to poetry and an entirely new mode of self-expression, but I truly thought that I could never make a living from writing.
So I decided that I’d become a teacher since teachers are always in demand and I’d get to spread my love for books and writing to a new generation of humans!
Little did I know how perfect this career would be for me.
There’s no other job where you get to directly influence the lives of the next generation every time that you walk into work. And you’re not sitting in an office staring at a computer all day, poring over spreadsheets.
As a teacher, I’ll get to spend my time in my favorite place--school--with my favorite kind of humans--kids!
Of course, the job is going to be stressful; it’s a ton of responsibility to run your own classroom while making sure that 25 kids are learning how to do addition and subtraction.
The enormity of the job has scared me into thinking, "Am I really doing the right thing?"
But the job is so much more than teaching content.
Yes, teachers should be masters of the content they’re teaching but let’s face it, everyone reading this has had at least one teacher who misspelled a word on the overhead projector or forgot to bring copies of graded homework back to school.
No one is perfect, even superhero teachers.
The point of being a teacher is to nurture and inspire kids as much as you can.
Students need an adult who will support their dreams and help them when they mess up.
They need to know that in this world, they can become anything and do anything.
Even if students already have a terrific, loving family at home who does all of that for them, it never hurt anyone to have a role model like that at school, too.
Teachers aren’t perfect, but they’re the type of people who will go above and beyond for their students.
We may not have all of the answers but together we can fill that gap with knowledge.
If you want to become a teacher, you’re doing the right thing.
