So here I am, embarking on a new chapter of my life, a chapter that started in that classroom fall quarter of this year, and I need a new credo. This credo will lead me into my new field with a new set of expectations and concerns and hopes.
As a teacher, I want my kids to learn to love themselves and to learn to love to write and express themselves in whatever way they see fit. I need them to know that writing isn’t about the five paragraph essays or the thesis statements. That is completely different brain that handles that. Writing to write is about synthesizing everything in your schemata with everything in your life and spicing it up with all of the feelings and emotions you can’t express. Real writing is getting your story on paper. It doesn’t need to even be a story. It can just be these ranty things that I keep doing. It is just the most healthy thing in the world to sit down and empty your brain into words. It is like taking the most inexplicable theory in physics and translating it for dummy’s. While the same exact principle doesn’t apply to writing, it is the same concept: making something that is indescribable possibly understandable by a wide cross section of individuals.
I want writing to become a place where they can escape from everything that is hurting them in their lives. I want them to know that they can find refuge on paper, in their words. I want them to know that I will always be willing to read what they have written. I want them to feel safe in the English language and in the fact that I will always be there to support them as people and as writers and as thinkers. I want to be the teacher who will wear the macaroni necklace the kid has made for her because she thinks it is beautiful. I want to fill the role in the lives of my students that teachers like Caitlin have filled in my life.
I couldn’t make the change I am making right now if I didn’t have faith in the system of teaching and the role the influential teacher plays in the life of a child. Most every hero I have in my life was my teacher at some point. They cared for me as a student and as a human being while I was in their class and even now, years after our classroom discussions came to an end, they are still reaching out a hand for me and lending me words of confidence. That’s making an impact. That is changing someone’s life by being a part of it. That’s making someone secure in themselves, in the choices they make and in the support system they have if everything comes crashing down. I will be that teacher.
I cannot speak enough to the importance of that type of scaffolding in one’s life. Teachers got me through my step dad leaving, my grandpa’s death and now through my life changing decision to become a teacher. The only person I can say that I knew would always be here for me, since I got to CCM is Caitlin Kane and she is a model for everything I want to be in a teacher and a person. She is the most comforting person in the world and is so passionate about teaching and everything she does that it makes you wonder how she has enough room in her heart to love everyone as much as she does. I think that the decision to become a teacher has been living in me since the beginning of senior year but it took someone as strong, supporting and wonderful as Caitlin to assure me that I could do it. I needed such an amazing model of success to look up to in order to find the strength within myself to make the transition.
I cannot thank God enough, eight million three hundred thousand and fifty two times over, for bringing the two of us together as friends. There is no one else in the world who understands so precisely my every emotion and thought and feeling. I hope that can live up to being the ‘same person’ as her.
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