I lay here, admittedly jaded and disappointed in the institution of education. I'm compelled to reflect on my experience of becoming a teacher because I can't sleep; my heart beat is irregular and I'm unsettled, feeling some kind of way. I'm not sure what my thoughts were when I started my education program. I have always been good at school so when the "stock market crashed", as I graduated from NYU with my first master's degree, and finding a job became a daunting task, I was cornered. The question of what do you want to do with your life? held me in a dark corner and forced me to think, quickly and purposefully of an answer.
I evaluated my experience; the list of what I knew how to do was long. The list of what I could learn to do even more lengthy but the one thing I felt the desire to do the most was to teach. I remembered 4th grade and the smile on my teacher's face as she looked at me and said "you are smart". I could see me walking across the cafeteria in 6th grade and my TAG (talented and gifted) teacher beckoning me to come closer to say "your walk is regal. You are like the African queens who used to rule". I recall 7th grade and my teacher and friend saying "don't mind the ones who boo you on stage. You will run someone's business one day." Or better yet, run your own, as a teacher would later decide for me. Many other moments of encouragement became my impetus to teach. It is as if I knew the only chance this world has at world peace rests on the backs of its teachers. We are the ones having one-on-one sessions with the future every day. Tomorrow's people are our pupils and I wanted very much to give back the gratitude I felt for the teachers who took the time to speak words of love and inspiration to me.
My only dilemma was that my education background was missing one sheet of paper. A teaching certificate. I thought it absurd that the desire to teach was alas not enough. My years of education and higher education and diverse world education, was not good enough for the system. There was no one to advocate on my behalf and say, here's an exception to the bureaucracy, as there should be. No one to say the paperwork requirement needs to be waived and so after getting rejected from alternative education programs, near broke and impoverished, I enrolled in the first program that would have me. I knew enough about financing graduate school to understand that student financial lenders would love to enslave me with loan debt and education institutions would happily play their part in the scam. I enrolled in school and began this two year journey toward my teaching certificate. What a scam it is to have to pay to do what you love, the oldest yet most common trick in the book. Institutionalized classism. Life taxed. The other way to get eaten alive. But what can you do, start a business with no money? Go dark? (which I considered often)
So here I am, in my last semester. Paying for student teaching as I work for free. Paying to do what I've been doing the last seven years. Paying, essentially, for a piece of paper that says the state of New York and any other state that honors the certificate, can trust that I know what I say I know. All I can do is shake my head at the way things work and each and every day encourage my students to find a better way to structure the world through lesson plans that give hope and content that is refreshing. Curriculum where the instructional plan is fluid and the motivation says we are in this together. That is my dream. Maybe this is what my teachers saw in me--the norm they also wanted to disrupt. Perhaps it will come to pass one day soon, I have hope. I always have hope.
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