I felt for a long while that in a casual setting, I was good at helping people. I could talk them through the problems they faced, whether academic or not, and was generally praised by my peers for doing so. As a senior in high school, I made a little extra money on the side by tutoring middle and high school students in math. I worked in my school’s library during lunch tutoring other subjects as well – reviewing papers for English classes, helping folks with their French, and leading review sessions for History and Biology. If you’re like me, and find that you have a knack for leading others, or just being able to explain things in a way that people can understand, then you might consider becoming a teacher! I know I surely did not!
As a high school senior, I wanted nothing more to do with public education once I left. I was good at school, but I had a thirst for something more creative and fulfilling. It didn’t help that I felt that I hadn’t learned anything useful until my senior year. I was jaded. My parents and friends suggested I look into becoming an educator, and I said no way. That’s a cop-out. That’s the easy path. I yearn for something different.
But I still enjoyed helping others, so my path began in college to become a therapist. It took me about 8 weeks to understand that this was a mistake. The reason I felt that becoming a therapist was a mistake was because the clientele I’d find myself working with in that role were not the clientele I envisioned myself working with professionally. As an 18 year old kid, I knew I wanted to work with people like me – creative, gritty, ambitious, dedicated, and maybe sometimes emotionally unwell. Afterall, that’s just part of the normal course of life.
After college, I still did not want to teach. I wanted to write, produce, and create. But after doing that for a summer, freelancing with minimal success and interning, I realized that the life of a creator was not the life for me. It was 2018, and I needed to pivot.
My final year of college, I had to take some science classes to fulfill a general credit, and the ones I chose were aimed at elementary education majors. I enjoyed the classes, but sometimes the discussion would fall onto lesson planning and other sorts of professional responsibilities for teachers which at the time, I knew nothing about. I just did what I needed to do to earn my credit. One of the projects for the course was to design some sort of interactive thing that could be used in a classroom, and submit an appropriate lesson plan with it if applicable. Since I hadn’t learned anything about lesson planning at that point, I was exempt from that portion of the project.
I created a card game that explained the physics of sound waves, wherein the players were facing off in an “UNO”-esque competition to manipulate a sound wave to match a given target and score points. I had fun making it, and got the cards printed on cardstock and sleeved. The whole thing was linked to a tone generator app I downloaded that allowed me to manipulate the variables for two sound waves simultaneously, so that players could hear as the wave they were fixing adjusted in relation to the target wave.
After I presented the project to the class, the professor said to me, “Why the hell aren’t you an education major?” Sometimes it just takes the right person to say it at the right time before the idea starts to germinate in your head.
In August of 2018, three months after graduation and after a summer realizing I was on a path leading me nowhere I wanted to actually go, I gave that professor a call, and asked him how to become an educator. I also sought affirmation from other teachers, mentors, family, friends, and loved ones. And I decided to go back to school to become an educator.
It took 2 years of study. I got a full-time job working retail and lived at home, saving as much money as I could so that I could enroll in a program, and then continued to work part time while I was studying. From 2019 to 2021, I was learning everything I’d missed, and I loved it.
The pandemic slowed things down and robbed me of some experiences I felt were critical in helping me become a teacher. I student taught as students were returning to classrooms in a hybrid model. Even though my cooperating teachers told me I was a great student teacher, and gave me nothing but praise as I prepared to take on my first job, I walked into my first teaching position feeling so unbelievably underprepared.
You may be a high schooler, thinking about going into education (or not) and getting ready to go to college to realize, change, or find your dream. You may be in college deciding whether a career in education is right for you. You may be a first or second year teacher looking for affirmation that you’re doing the right things, or ideas on how to improve. Even a veteran teacher 20 years in, continuing to innovate with your school’s new initiatives.
We don’t know what we’re doing.
And throughout the longevity of this blog, I hope we can figure it out together and help future generations of students realize their potential to be better people and forge a better world for all of us.