Blog Post 13

At times, this course will be challenging but it is necessary to fulfill your passion. Before we divulge into the difficulties, lets reflect on why you chose to be a teacher. Watch the video This is Why You Should Teach then write a post explaining why you wanted to be a teacher and how you plan to reach this goal.

Ever since I was a little girl I knew I wanted to be a teacher. I use to sit my stuffed animals, as if they were my students, according to a seating chart that I had made. I would send the “bad students” to my mother, who was the principal. The children would have recess, music, and P.E just like regular classes. As I got older and began babysitting, my passion grew real. I soon realized that teaching was my calling and there was nothing else I wanted to do. One of my favorite subjects is math and during middle school I decided that I wanted to become a math teacher. In the seventh grade I began asking my teachers what degrees and how much schooling it would take to become a teacher. As I got older and reached high school, my dream slightly altered. I fell for the younger age group and realized my heart was at the elementary level. My dream to teach remained the same but what I wanted to teach differed. My sophomore year in high school I was a part of the school’s Spanish Club. One of our community service projects was to go to a trailer park in Canton, Mississippi and help the Hispanic students with their homework. I learned that majority of these students are living in homes where the parents hardly know any English and, for the most part, are incapable of helping their children with their homework. This experience changed my outlook, once again, on teaching. By now I was determined to be an elementary teacher but my dream became bigger than just elementary students. It turned into teaching Hispanic students, at the elementary level, English. This led to extensive research on degrees and the best path to take in order to pursue this dream. As a result, I am an elementary education major with a minor in Spanish. In order to become as fluent as possible in Spanish, I plan to either study abroad in Chile or engross myself in the Hispanic population within my surrounding area. After receiving my undergraduate degree, I will get my Master’s degree in English as a Second Language. My long-term goal is to move where there is a strong Hispanic population and teach within the school system. I believe becoming an English as a Second Language educator can have such an encouraging impact throughout schools and enable English learners to reach their fullest potential at the same rate as English natives. The beauty of the path I took, is that no matter where life takes me, I will have the capability to teach.