A moment for teaching

I want to be a teacher.

I don’t know why, but writing that line was filled with adrenaline and like pushing myself over the edge. When people ask me what I want to do with my degree or what you can do with my degree, I always tell them that I plan to be a teacher. Not that I want to be one, but that the profession just seems to be what’s in the cards, so I am doing I guess… I have a lot of shame about wanting to be a teacher because there is a part of me that feels like choosing that path and that future will strip me away from being a real person. I work for a research team that is actively accepting grant money in order to “bust myths” about the career, but still there is this nagging inside of me, this image that I keep shoving further and further into my peripheral.

My perception of teachers is two-fold. As a student, I know very little about how teachers can live their lives outside of academic settings. It seems often that their job is all they are. You here stories of them grading papers late into the nights or panicking to get a lesson prepared outside of their working hours. The job always seems like never ends. Additionally, the teachers who you do know have other none academic pursuits, I always felt were teaching me less (even though thats not always true) because they had been camping with their family and therefore my essay would be unreviewed until next week. This perception felt noble when I was younger, but seems really saddening to me now. I also grew up with two parents who were teachers so I experienced a bit of the working side of things to compliment my student-held bias. There was always workplace politics and concerns about administration circling the dinner-table, and while this is probably not unique to teaching, that association was made before I left kindergarten. Teaching was one of those jobs where your attention was always split between the classroom and whatever you were doing. My mother and father were constantly worried about their classes even if they tried not to be. There is always one more lesson to fix, one more essay to grade, one more student to fret over. Teaching quickly became a lifestyle rather than an occupation.

When I consider what I value, the main phrase hovering around me is “authentic connection.” I long for a sense of belonging, but only if it is genuine and true. Teaching immediately fills the space in my life for connection to individual people, to a larger community, to the universe as a whole, but I am not sure that it leads to connection with myself, whoever that maybe.

If I look back on my life in Golden, CO and ask myself what values I am living my life according to I am met with an answer of: “efficiency”. I am succeeding by many standards and everything I do, I try to do it very efficiently. I think this is why I am struggling so much to think of how to merge these practices of this trip with my attitude and mindset of real life. It is really not that efficient to spend 40 minutes drinking tea each morning. Efficiency is also plaguing this idea of a future self I have. If I want to become a teacher, efficiency will make me a decent one and pretty fast. Efficiency is also going to ensure that I lose my sense of self in teaching. My shame is propelled by my fears. This is the path I am going on and if I don’t figure out a way to fix it, it will become my future. But, I want to be a teacher. During some of the hardest years of my life thus far, teaching was my reason to get up in the morning. The prospect of being able to help a student learn something new and feel like they had a place in the classroom was the only thing I looked forward to each week. I just don’t want to be the kind of teacher that I have this image of in my head.

I need to preface the description of the type of teacher I want to become as a work in progress. I need this preface for myself because I am in a bit of a crisis over committing to a future that I have yet to really immerse myself in, but, hey, I guess that’s your 20’s. With this caveat made, I shall proceed.

I want to be the type of teacher with a life beyond the classroom. Not anything crazy, but I want to have friends who I don’t work with. I want to see movies with these friends and have dinners with them and talk about all our different workplace politics. I want to be the type of teacher who carries an air of serenity with her. Not a blind optimism, but an understanding that life is a never ending series of hills and soon enough this trough will be a crest or vice versa. I want to be the type of teacher that both students and coworkers respect even if it is hard to admit. Being a full fledged person will be worth it even if it may have short term catches with my job performance. I want to be the type of teacher who doesn’t complain to her students about her job. Of course it will be hard and suck at times, but my attitude most definitely will affect theirs, my current perception is proof enough. I want to have so many reasons to get up in the morning. I want to want to get up in the morning because I know that I am living my life in aspiration of and according to “authentic connection.”