I've gone back to work teaching part time. These past two weeks, we've been in our classrooms, attending meetings, and doing all those little things that need to get done before the kids walk through the door. Every year of my teaching career (I'm about to enter into my 23rd), there are attempts to help teachers find balance in their lives. There are workshops and discussions, small group get togethers, and commitments by everyone to not work as hard this year as last.
Nothing has changed this year. In fact, we were all handed a leather journal and asked to complete a writing assignment that will be given to us every week. I have mixed feelings about this, but have decided to make the attempt.
The first topic of the journal is why I became a teacher. This is a difficult question for me to answer, but here's my attempt:
I was combing through photos the other day, clearing out my computer files of accumulations I really don't need when I came across a photo of Rubin, our dog, as a 9 week old puppy. He stood in the kitchen looking up at something, his round puppy belly covered in red curls, his tail straight up, and his ears perked and ready for action.
And then I laughed. The laughter came out of nowhere and caught me by surprise. He is now an adult version of that puppy picture in all respects except for his legs. In the photo, his body is about 10 inches in length, but his legs are about 3 inches high. Today, Rubin is all legs -- the tall, muscular legs of his poodle genes. But in the photo, I could barely find his legs and this is what made me laugh. Sure, I can see the adult Rubin in the puppy Rubin, but what I realized is that as he aged, his legs simply got longer. He literally grew up, his legs stretching tall lifting his body further off the ground with each passing month.
When I look back at my career as a teacher, I realize I am much like Rubin. I didn't have teacher legs. I had these little stubs that held up a form uncertain of my potential. I look back on why I became a teacher and I can't put my finger on any one moment or person that said, "You must teach" nor did I have any desire to teach. Not really.
My mother would disagree pointing out that as a kid I always liked hanging out with younger kids and as a teenager, volunteered to work at a school for autistic children all on my own. "No one made you do that," my mother would say. That may be, but I still don't remember saying to myself "I want to be a teacher."
I wanted to be a professional athlete most of my high school years and as a little kid, I wanted to dance on the Carol Burnett Show, but I the latter was more because I knew at a very young age I was gay though I had no language for it. I just had a serious crush on Carol Burnett. If I danced on her show, I'd be close to her.
I didn't go to college to become a teacher. Instead I worked in television news hoping one day to be an editor, which I thought would catapult me into film making. Then, after about three years working for an industry I have very little respect for anymore, I left, headed back to school and got my teaching degree. Looking back, I haven't a clue why I made that choice. I know I had some friends who encouraged it, I know I was fed up with my stressful job, I know I was at the end of tumultuous relationship, and I know I was always a follower more than a leader so somehow, someway I followed something other than my own initiative into teaching.
And the first years were anything but easy. Still that's when my legs grew, if you will, and 5 years later, then 10, then 15 I looked down and saw that my teacher legs had gotten longer and stronger. It was shortly after my 15th year of teaching that I could finally say to myself -- hey, I'm pretty good at this and really mean it. It was a bumpy, bumpy road up until that point and I still have moments when I doubt, in the deepest sense, what the hell I'm doing or have done with my life.
But these are my legs. Whatever path led me here, I've come to realize, was the right path. Just as Rubin was destined to be a long-legged dog even though he was born with stumpy short legs, there was some kind of voodoo working lifting me up into the teacher I am now.
And here I stand.
