"Clarity"

I recently had to blog for class and answer this question: Why do you want to teach? I decided to share my response with you. 

I originally wanted to be a teacher because I really enjoyed the "school environment." I always had positive experiences in school and was a successful student. School was the one area of my life where I (almost) always felt confident in my abilities. I was never good at one particular subject but could manage an A in all classes with, what to me was, little effort. When I was younger I would play school with my friends during the summer. For a majority of the time I would be the teacher with my little grade book of all my pretend students. Sometimes I was the student if the person that was the teacher was older than me. Even playing pretend school I would learn a lot from the older "teacher" and that made me excited to be learning things that they were learning in school. It was not until college that I really found a "good" reason to enter into the teaching profession. I was taking education classes and observing in the local schools, and I was blown away after seeing how much poverty and baggage students had to carry with them to school every day. They were carrying a lot more than what their little backpacks could hold. Having grown up in private schools my whole life, I did not understand how desperate some of these students were. Students shared their stories with me. They told me stories of going to their parents' funerals, not sleeping the night before because of adults fighting and the police arriving at their house, being able to visit a parent in jail and having one of their parents deported to Mexico. My heart truly began to break for these children who seemed to have nothing going for them, and for a short while I debated switching my major to social work so I could help protect these kids. When you teach you do not see the final harvest of your labor, and I felt that if I switched to social work I would be able to help these children now and make sure that they were cared for in some way. After I thought about it for a little while I came to the conclusion that while feeding, clothing and loving them now might be best for me, the best way that I could help them was by giving them a quality education and preparing them for the life they have ahead of them as adults. Food, clothing and shelter are all good things now, but if a student grows up and does not have a good education and the tools to succeed in life, you have only appeased that need for a short time, and they will have even greater needs later.

So this is why I want to be a teacher. I am confident that I can give my future students a quality education that will help prepare them for whatever might be ahead of them. I have usually encouraged my peers to begin careers in the field of education, but lately I have been more hesitant because I have realized that there is too much at risk if another "so-so" teacher enters our schools. The students that I will teach are going to be the ones that will someday run our country, and there is too much at risk if they are just passed along because I was selfish and just wanted the school environment. Instant gratification and selfishness has seeped, no flooded, its way into our everyday lives and teachers that do not realize what is at risk if they do not do their jobs will someday see the results of that lack of clarity.

- love, briana -