Reflections from a Third-Grade Classroom

It may come as a surprise that I did not always want to go into education.  Most teachers (or teaching candidates) that I have met seem to have known since childhood that education was their calling.  I, on the other hand, believed wholeheartedly that teaching was droll, domestic, and suburban.  I was incredibly wrong.

Growing up as the oldest child, I was always fiercely independent.  There was a great exciting world out there, and I was determined to investigate every inch of it.  When my parents dropped me off at kindergarten for the first time, the tears shed were not my own.  I jumped at any chance for adventure, and was reading at a fifth-grade level by the end of first grade.  Books allowed me to experience the world in a way that no six-year old possibly could.  I was the child huddled in a corner, hiding in a closet, or sitting in a tree with one book in her hand and another in her pocket ready-to-go.  Though exciting for me, it did not bode well for my social life, and I had difficulty relating and interacting with my peers.

As I matured into a young adult, a longtime infatuation with ballet turned serious.  I was accepted into numerous summer internships and intensive programs and was dancing year-round at the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre while still in high school.  My family remained in Michigan, meaning that I was living 350 miles away from my parents at the age of 17.  I loved everything about ballet, but the independence that came with it was a definite draw.  Cities, with their teeming streets and pulsing conflicts, feel like home to me, and ballet companies can only exist in areas like these.  There is something about the intensity and control of ballet that juxtaposes itself just so against a careening torrent of that lifestyle, which strikes a perfect, if tenuous, balance.  As exciting as this environment was for me, it is not well suited to children, who need air and space and trees and summer gardens.  I was convinced that children had no place in my life.

As expected, the inevitable fall from grace left me spectacularly stunned and completely confused as to the direction of my life.  A car accident and subsequent injuries made a career in ballet nearly impossible, and suddenly I was enrolling in college with no idea of what to do there.  I chose the most familiar, comfortable thing I knew, and enrolled in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan.  Here, I found an entirely new world that excited me in ways that I had never expected.  I found that I loved academia, and routinely signed up for 18 credits a semester, because I couldn’t bear to miss out on any of the offerings.  I studied French and Latin, where I learned more about the evolution and intimate workings of language than I had in any English course.  I added a second major of Classical Archaeology.  I became politically active for the first time in my life, and began volunteering for the Detroit Project, a student organization that devoted themselves to low-income areas of Detroit.  During it all, I taught dance classes at a local studio to help cover my expenses and was surprised to discover that I adored children.  More importantly, they seemed to connect with me as well.

It was at the end of my undergraduate career that a career in education became my top priority.  Working at the Detroit Project had opened my eyes to the injustice of social reproduction and had ignited a passion to implement social change.  I thought about joining the Peace Corps, and through that, discovered Teach for America.  I attended meetings, met with advisors, filled out applications, and drafted essays.  I read books by Freire, Delpit, and Kozol, cementing my belief that working in education put you on the front lines in the battle for social justice.  However, before submitting anything, I ran into a friend of mine from high school who was a member of the Teach for America program.  She was overworked, burned out, and going back to school to be a nurse.  I realized that my best chance at success would be though education itself.  I needed theory, facts, and experience on my side before I would be ready to teach in the way that I wanted.

I applied to Michigan State’s Post-BA program in Elementary Education, and have been working on my degree since.  This is my last semester, and I can honestly and wholeheartedly say that this decision was the best one that I could have possibly made.  I have made some wonderful contacts, liaisons, and friends during my time here, and passionately believe that this is my true calling.  While developing my views on critical pedagogy, I began to investigate the role of technology in education, and honestly found it lacking.  I believe that technology perfectly embraces the goals of critical pedagogy, and that it should be an integral part of any critical curriculum.  I applied to MSU’s Master’s Program in Educational Technology and am two-thirds completed at this point in time.  I will be finished in the summer of 2009.