You want to go into teaching? But why...?

The amount of times I get asked this question is mind boggling. Why is it crazy that someone loves children enough to go out and educate them? 1. The pay. Everyone is worried about how little pay I will get as a teacher, but when you grow up with a total family income of 30k a year, being a strong and successful teacher and being married to a successful man will allow me to have a more than comfortable life. 2. The students. Everyone is worried about the headaches I will have, the long nights they will cause me, the loudness of their voices piercing my ears hours after coming home. But thats not what it is. I get headaches because I stay up worrying about the students who don't have it as good as the others. The long nights are caused by me figuring out what I could do to help my students flourish. The loudness of their voice SHOULD pierce my ears, for they have a voice that needs to be used. They need to speak. They need to stand up for themselves. Every reason that people have as to why I shouldn't b a teacher has gone from one ear and straight out the other.

Nobody will tell me how to leave an impact on this world. I choose to do it through teaching.

The following is my educational biography, to help you understand my background and how I got here.

Educational Biography  

As future educators, it is important for us to be able to look back at our educational experiences, and in turn benefit from them in our own classrooms. We often hear that our experiences make us who we are, but we don't often look back at those events in our lives. A class, a person, a teacher, a book, an event, and/or a conversation has shaped our minds in one way or another, and will influence us when we are teaching our own students. 

Growing up, my parents have raised me to know what happened to our home land, and what they went through as young adults. When the war broke out in 1992, my family was left to escape their homeland of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The small country in Southeastern Europe was founded in March of 1992. Prior to finding their independence and the war, Bosnia was a part of the Ottoman Empire from the 15h century. As far back as I can trace my family, they have been located in Bosnia. My parents are from there, my grandparents, great grandparents, etc. After the war broke out, my parents had no choice but to leave everything and come to America. 

My mother never graduated high school, to be specific she only went up to the fourth grade and neither of my parents finished a college degree. This is one of the largest reasons as to why I decided to pursue my degree. My parents have always showed me how difficult of a life people live when they don't have a college degree. My mother cleans and my father is a truck driver, and they have never wanted me nor my siblings to fall down that path: the path of making ends barely meet. The constant push to do well in school was prominent in my education from an early age. I would constantly strive to do better and stay organized so that I wouldn't fall behind or become labeled as a “bad child” in my classrooms. My teachers quickly became a large part of my life and the reason why I am who I am today. 

One teacher in particular comes into mind whenever I am asked a question somewhere along the lines of, “what teacher has impacted you most?”. From kindergarten to where I am now, each teacher has somehow impacted me in my education and development. Aside from each one having their own ways to impact their students, one teacher strongly comes to mind when I think of who has impacted me most. She may not know it, but Dr. Phillips has had a large impact on who I am as a student and how I hold myself up in my college courses.

My freshman year of college was a hard transition, from classes to friends to being away from family, it was a difficult transition from high school to college. For my first year I had hardcore nursing classes that consumed most of my time, but I had a year long English class I enjoyed more than any of the other classes I took. At first I was the typical college student, annoyed that I had to take a class that had nothing to do with my degree, but I sucked it up. I attended class for a whole year with the same professor and the same classmates. Dr. Phillips is the reason I enjoyed that class so much, and is also the reason that I started to see how a true teacher interacts with her students. She focused the whole year on discussion and informing us on what was happening in our society. We looked into immigration, schools, American prison problem, and even more. She initiated discussion from each and every one of us and made sure that we spoke what our minds in that classroom. She made sure that our grade wasn't determined by 3 exams and a final, but from our opinions, discussion, and our willingness to dig deeper into literature. Doesn't that sound familiar.. (Foundations of Education with Anthony DeCesare)

Although I was planning on pursuing my degree in nursing, I decided to switch after my first year because I realized that it's not what my place in this world was to be. I remember being in elementary school and being Mrs.A in my basement ‘classroom’. During the summer, when students were out of school, I made them attend my school. Call me crazy, but I had assigned seats, homework assignments, and even lesson plans. My brothers ping pong table would be folded up, using it as my chalkboard and my notebook would be folder open, using it as my laptop. I took what I learned from previous and current teachers and I used all of their tactics in my makeshift classroom. I learned from doing and from visuals, and little did I know this would follow me for the rest of my life. 

Throughout my education, I had always learned from watching and repeating. I became the visual learner who was observant of their surroundings. This started to largely impact on the way I learned, but also the way I started to teach. My senior year of highschool I got a job as a swim teacher. I never thought “oh teaching how fun”, I thought “cool I swam in highschool so I assume I can teach others how to swim”. I quickly learned that teaching was a strength of mine. I started using my ability to visually learn, to visually teach. I learned that children understand swimming with their arms if you tell them to scoop ice cream, and they understand to hold their breath if you tell them there's a bubble in their mouths. I became good at what I was doing and I felt confident in my abilities to teach. From that job, I had a boss that emphasized how we speak to the children. We were to watch a video called “Silver Boxes”. The main purpose of this video was to remember that everything you say that is positive to someone is like a present wrapped up in a silver box. 

Silver boxes has had a large impact on how I speak to my students and others. It influenced me to see how strong one word can affect a person. We often forget about how we speak to children, and how that could impact their further education. We all remember that one teacher who said something mean to us or was negative in the classroom, and we remember how we feel about that teacher to this very day. But a teacher who was kind, full of laughter, and expanded our imaginations is the kind that we remember positively. The words that they gave us, those silver boxes, have stayed with us through our lives. Imagine what a positive impact I could make as a teacher by just treating my children as humans. 

My parents pushing me to succeed, Dr. Phillips classroom, my imaginary classroom, and silver boxes, have all had a strong impact on me. These factors have influenced me on what a teacher should be, how to be a good teacher for my children, and how strong of an impact school has on a child. Teaching isn't just throwing material to kids and having them repeat it back to you. Teaching is about helping students grow through their education, but also in their identities. As a teacher, I hope to show students the importance of their education as my parents did. As a teacher, I hope to bring real world problems into my class just as Dr. Phillips did. As a teacher, I hope to respect my children as I did as Mrs.A. And as a teacher, I hope to give my children silver boxes and let them know that I am not only there as an educator, but as a person who helps them succeed in themselves.