Why do I want to become a teacher? To put it simply, I love helping others learn, and, despite the supposedly miniscule salary, it pays a whole lot better than scanning groceries at Walmart. In reality my reasons are much more complex than that. When I was trying to determine what profession I should enter I continually asked myself, “if I did not need money in order to survive, what would I be doing right now”. I struggled with this question for several months before I came to an answer: helping people and interacting with people in a way that brings me joy. Helping people is a pretty broad concept, but I tend to think of it as anything that I can do to provide others with something that serves to benefit them in some way. This something can be as simple as happiness or as complex as the foundations of biology. There are dozens of careers that meet this description, but teaching just seems to make the most sense for me. I have quite severe inattentive-type ADHD, and my brain tends to leap from hyperfixation to hyperfixation every couple months. I could not imagine a career that required me to do the exact same tasks, for the exact same people every single day. A career in teaching would allow me to meet new people every year and majoring in biology specifically would allow me to endlessly change the specific examples I used within my lessons, as our understanding of life is constantly changing.
Over the past three months I have found that my desire to become a teacher has only solidified. University has presented me with countless opportunities to teach others, and I love it. I have unofficially-tutored a handful of students in both my BIOL 120 and BIOL 121 courses, and it has taught me a lot about how to teach people with differing learning styles and knowledge levels. Since the curriculum for BIOL 120 is quite similar to the Biology 30 curriculum, I have also picked up a few examples, analogies, and tricks that I plan to use in my own classroom. ECUR 165 has also played a major role in reaffirming my beliefs about teaching. Each class I attended seemed to parrot my own views and beliefs back at me, albeit with more advanced terminology, which I found incredibly comforting coming from a small town school that did not share most of these beliefs.
Prior to attending ECUR 165, I did have my concerns about becoming a teacher. Most of my fears were passed on to me by my own teachers. I had been told that teaching was essentially a minimum wage job, that teachers did not actually get spring and winter break off, that the workload was mind-numbing, and that everyone -the school board, the principal, the union, the students, and the parents- would treat you like dirt. It turns out that none of that is true. Teaching has a lot to do with choice. If you choose to live like a surgeon on a teacher’s salary, then a teacher’s salary is not a living wage. If you choose not to set boundaries with your students, coworkers, and school then you may end up working during the holidays. If you choose to assign a mind-numbing amount of work, then you will have to grade a mind-numbing amount of work. If you treat everyone around you like dirt, then they will probably treat you like dirt too. After writing my professionalism paper, I realized that the only teachers I ever heard making these comments were the “bad” ones. If teaching truly is that awful of a career, I think that I would be hearing these comments from good teachers.
I have, however, retained one fear about becoming a teacher. That I will make mistakes. I feel confident in my ability to differentiate lessons, plan assessments, and treat each student as their own unique person. I really do think that I will be a good teacher, but I just can't help worrying that I will accidentally teach my students incorrect information. What if I accidently confuse osmosis and diffusion, or colons and semicolons? My absolute worst nightmare as a teacher would be to pass my flaws and misunderstandings on to my students. That being said, everyone makes mistakes, and it won’t ruin my students’ lives if they don’t know how to use semicolons.
Overall, I cannot wait to become a teacher. Writing out each of these portfolio tasks has helped me to realize just how much I look forward to teaching. I have begun to notice myself developing a “teacher mindset”; constantly thinking of how I would teach the things I am currently learning to others, and picking apart the teaching methods of my professors. While I definitely still have a long way to go, I think that I am on the right track to becoming a teacher.
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