When we are younger we have all these big dreams and ideas of what we want to be when we are older. Some of us wanted to be mermaids or superstars, the next WWE champion or in the MLB. As we get older those dreams typically fade and more realistic ones take their place. When I was younger I wanted to be a nurse and it wasn’t till high school that I found my
vocation to teach.
Growing up my mom was/ is a teacher and she always told my sister and I “you can be a teacher if you want, but you also can be whatever you want.” Hearing the back end of things in the career, I never felt like teaching was my thing until a school counselor changed how I valued and appreciated teachers. Junior year started off like any other. I mean I took some challenging classes, but nothing felt impossible until everyone’s world took a halt. COVID-19 shut down my school two weeks after my class took the ACT. Everyone in my grade knew it was coming, it was just about when. Unlike many schools in Wisconsin my school had us attend all our classes virtually and actually graded all the work as if it was normal. I thought I wanted to be a nurse, but online classes ruined my joy in science. Concepts that were once an easy A just didn’t make sense through the lens of a laptop camera. A lot of my teachers were doing the best they could and I understood; however, my teachers seemed to have a hard time understanding that this shutdown was difficult for everyone to navigate and my classmates and I were doing the best we could as well. At the end of the day I didn’t love science anymore and, considering nursing is a bunch of science, I didn’t see nursing as an exciting future venture either.
During this time I met with my school counselor and occasionally her husband who was also my math teacher. She and I had weekly meetings because as good as I was doing in school there were a lot of pieces in my life that weren’t good junior year. My school counselor, Mrs. Olson, was a tall brunette who truly cared more about what was best for her students than their grades. I needed this lady. After a few conversations, Mrs. Olson told me that it was more important to her that I’m happy than if I have a full schedule. She continued by saying that instead of having a full schedule next year with classes I would dread daily, I should think of a different interest and job shadow half the day. At first this idea made me nervous because, even though she reassured me I’d still graduate on time and be fine, I am the type of person who preferred having more on their plate rather than less. That being said I eventually agreed and resorted to the only other thing I used to really pretend to be as a kid: Teaching. Her face lit up as this is exactly what she’d hoped I’d pick. She told me that even when I was a freshman she could see me as a teacher because I was an “old soul with a heart of gold” and that’s “exactly what schools are starting to lack”. She said that she felt like I was always meant to work with kids and I had the potential to be great at it. I am really bad with mushy compliments like that,
but her saying it made me want to cry.
Throughout highschool I always felt like the overlooked kid cause I did well in classes. Not great so teachers couldn’t brag about me, but not bad so they couldn’t get mad at me either. It’s such a small thing and to most probably wouldn’t be a critical event, but if I never had that conversation with Mrs. Olson I would have never shadowed, I probably wouldn’t have applied to St. Norbert, and I definitely would not be studying education right now.
I chose this for my sixth reflection because it quite literally has to do with why I am studying what I am. That’s the first time I felt like someone in the school system cared about me for just being a good person. This changed my values and beliefs because before this conversation I felt like I could never be a teacher, I felt like none of the teachers cared about me so why go into a work place where kids think I hate them. Not to mention politicians say way too much about classrooms they’ve never been in. I have learned to value that it’s not about what people on the outside say, what you feel is more important.
