It’s time for a little bio…
I knew I wanted to be a teacher in high school; the decision being a result of my own education, experiences with (good and bad) teachers, and many other things. Shortly after I made this decision, my high school offered a class for people like me that involved going to a local elementary school for an hour every day. I took this class for three semesters, working with 2nd, 3rd, and 5th graders – it was a great experience, and I’m fortunate that my school had the resources to offer it as an elective.
Teaching Fellows was introduced to me during high school, as well, and I applied for the highly competitive scholarship, not expecting to get it. Not only did I receive the award, which (at the time) provided $26,000 over four years to 400 recipients in North Carolina per year, but I got it for one of the most competitive schools, UNC Chapel Hill. Thus, when I graduated high school in 2001, I was kind of an elite member of the education community. I’m not saying this to make myself sound awesome – I’m often still surprised when I think about it. Mostly, I’m just giving some background.
In college, as part of the UNC Teaching Fellows program, I was in the classroom for an hour every week my freshman year, and about 3 hours a week sophomore year. Junior year, I entered the UNC School of Education, and began my professional coursework. Unfortunately, the strain of school and a job I’d taken on my sophomore year, in addition to my inner struggle with depression, anxiety disorder, and ADHD, caused me to falter toward the end of my junior year, and I dropped the semester and took two years off of school.
That two years, in many ways, would prove to be the least productive, and most boring and horrible years of my short life, to date. I did not work with children. At all. I worked two retail jobs at the mall, which sometimes meant back-to-back 12 hour days (with random 15-30 minute breaks) during Christmas. I was yelled at, broke, tired, and made to feel inferior for not being a sleazy salesperson. To put it simply, it sucked. A lot. Even when I got a better job, it still wasn’t what I wanted to do.
So I came back to school last fall, and am currently finishing up the previously dropped semester of my junior year. I’m happy to report that I’ve got, at the lowest, a B average this semester. And, while it was certainly strange to come back into the classroom (to the classes I was taking and the classes I was teaching), it felt like home. I felt like I knew what I was doing, that was where I was supposed to be. All the worries that I might not be able to do it, that I might fail, again, or not cut it in the classroom have melted away.
I find myself thinking like a teacher much more than I ever have – I dream about it, I jump out of bed in the middle of the night to jot down ideas that keep me awake, I think about teaching with (nearly) everything I do – I even blog about it.
I’m excited about teaching, again. Student teaching starts next year – I’ll have the same class all year, one full day a week in the fall and every day in the spring. I find myself anxious to find out in which grade and school I’ll be, so I can start thinking about what I’ll be teaching.
I find myself assuming the position.
And I like it.
