Why Teach?

The education profession is an exciting career choice for me because it is always changing. New settings, new students, new parents, new coworkers and new pedagogical ideas are always rotating through the life of a teacher. To explain my evolution as a teacher I will explain my own childhood education, the turning point when I realized I wanted to be a teacher and my vision of continuing to teach into the future.

My childhood education is fairly normative: I attended elementary, middle and high school in the public education system. I advanced from one grade to the next each subsequent year. My teachers were almost all white and the student population was about seventy-five percent white, with about fifty percent girls and fifty percent boys. I was privileged to have teachers who believed in my ability to achieve and I excelled in the traditional education system. My parents supported my reading and I often looked forward to homework. Although I got good grades, I often was not challenged enough in my classes and would become bored and distracted. Starting in the fourth grade, my school experimented with multi-age classrooms. Fourth, fifth and sixth graders were in one classroom together and teachers cycled through with the same children for all three years. In theory this switch could have allowed me to go ahead in curriculum and find peers among the sixth graders. Ultimately, however, I think there were too many students per classroom and while learning as a group we could only move as fast as the most struggling student. The only areas that I showed great improvement in were those that we broke up into levels for, including math and art. I was able to skip two years in math, which challenged me all the way through high school. In retrospect I realize that the multi-age grouping served limiting to me because the learning was compartmentalized and the curriculum was linear. Therefore I was only allowed to “learn” as far as the teacher, the students, and the curriculum would allow me to stretch.

By the time I started middle school I was beyond ready. I had wanted to skip the sixth grade year and go straight into middle school, but I did not communicate this desire with anyone and completed elementary school the standard way. I had already been busing to the middle school for math classes for two years, and my mother taught there so I acclimated to the change in schools quickly. Academically I continued to achieve high marks according to the system, but I grew most socially. I joined the theater program and acted in many of the school’s plays. Extracurricular activities and a new social group helped me learn how to communicate better and to be humble. In hindsight I can see the way that not practicing those skills more, earlier caused me hurt in some of my personal relationships, but through that hurt I grew.

My focus in high school changed. This was in part due again to a changing social group. The city had built a new high school and split the boundaries along an East/West line in order to not have a rich and a poor school. This move actually hurt many poor families from my neighborhood because we were sent to the school all the way across town, instead of the school only several blocks from our house. This move separated me from many of the close friendships I made. After that point I saw high school mainly as academic: I went in, did my work, and went home, at which point real life commenced. Apart from a handful of genuinely intriguing and challenging teachers, I became weary of the growing amount of “busy work”. Disillusioned with high school, I graduated high school a semester early, and skipped the graduation ceremony and prom.

It would be easy for someone to look at my school career as successful due to the grades and awards I earned throughout my time in school. However it is clear to me now how I was hurt, both socially and academically by following a traditional school model. My awareness of this was heightened in high school and immediately following by my participation in a Unitarian Universalist youth group. Together we built supportive relationships and learned about youth empowerment. Through that support my conformity with what was socially expected of me began to waver, especially going to college. I did not know what I would want to study in college, and saw more of a waste of my time if I decided to pursue college at that point. I decided to take an alternate route by attending a trade school for cosmetology. My skills thus far had been mostly developed intellectually, and here was my chance to develop a skill kinesthetically.

So there I was in beauty school, with time on my hands (as beauty schools go). My awareness of youth empowerment led me to become involved with conferences and workshops focused on anti-oppression. My interest was piqued regarding my identities and their relationship to society. I began reading anti-oppression theory books with all of my downtime in school. Everything changed for me when someone lent me, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together At the Cafeteria Table?” by Dr. Beverly Tatum. My study of youth empowerment had come full circle, because this book discussed youth empowerment and anti-oppression together. I came to the realization I wanted to be a parent someday, and I had no idea how I wanted to raise my children. I immediately began seeking out books and allies to discuss what I had learned to call “multicultural education.”

From that point on all of my leisure reading was dedicated to books on pedagogy. After six months of working as a cosmetologist I decided that the time had come to put my passion into action and to strengthen my core values, my knowledge, and my skills at being a teacher by going back to school. Taking a break after high school was crucial for me to get my head on straight and figure out what I was really passionate about. The college I attended required a whole slew of general education classes, but still, once my homework was done I amused myself by reading books about education.

I was inspired by Paulo Freire’s concept of revolutionary praxis being theory plus action. At that point I felt stuck in the theory stage. I felt little support from my education peers and teachers in studying progressive education. At that point I sought out Goddard College, because it allowed me to create me own focus within education, and freed up time for me to get hands on experience in the types of schools I had been reading about. Transferring colleges meant living out my ideals for me, instead of feeling stuck in a traditional institution.

My vision now is to draw from as many progressive educators as I can. I am about to start an internship at the Albany Free School. I have never taught in a free school before, but I am excited to see what elements I think could work for me as an educator. I stand strong in the belief that there are as many ways to best teach people, as there are people! Therefore I see my time now, as I complete my teacher licensure at Goddard, as time to continue to expose myself to and draw from progressive educators so that I may become a well-rounded educator myself.

Teaching is a way for me to become a well-rounded person, a dynamic parent and a contributor in the struggle to end oppression and make our world a better place to be. As I continue to evolve in this career I stand grounded in my childhood education, I am motivated by my turning point in youth empowerment, and I am inspired by my vision of an anti-oppressive education and my willingness to adapt. I dedicate my teaching career to my struggle as a life-long learner.