From an early age, I had an intense desire to help others–even at my own expense. I was the kid in middle school who felt compelled to allow my classmates to copy off of my paper during assignments and tests. Although it is obvious to me now that I was not really helping them at all, my youthful mind was convinced that I was doing them a great service. Nothing is worse than bringing home a failing grade, I used to think to myself.
As foreshadowing for my future vocation, I would even “help” out classmates who would openly make fun of me… My concern for their well-being seemed to outweigh my need to grow a backbone and stand up for myself.
I suppose in hindsight they did have quite a bit of material to mock. As a child of strict Caribbean parents who were devout Jehovah’s Witnesses, my appearance and clothing styles were probably less than desirable. I can write an entire memoir of my experiences in that religion as well, but that’s for another time. One of the main things this religion focused on was keeping things simple and separate. Therefore, my parents did not pursue much in terms of an education or career. Therefore, we were not well off financially, which was obvious by the way I dressed. Since we were encouraged to only befriend people of the same faith, I tended to keep to myself. I was not allowed to hang out with classmates outside of the classroom walls, unless I was going to preach to them about the “good news” in hopes of converting them to the religion. I chose to simply keep to myself to prevent further humiliation for being an overzealous, holier-than-thou church girl. But I was still not completely immune from the teasing.
There were also some of my physical characteristics. Having worn glasses since the age of six, my eyesight had gotten to the point where my lenses were thicker than aquarium plexiglass. My parents couldn’t afford braces at this time, so I had to live with both a huge gap and overbite, which impacted my speech and caused me to talk with a lisp. Some of my classmates had a field day with all of these flaws. Nevertheless, due to my naturally helpful nature and religious beliefs at this time, I still had love for these people and wanted to help them in my own way. Since I was a good student, my way of “helping” was to let them see the answers to my test or quiz.
As I got older, I found more healthy ways to help my classmates. I started tutoring in all subjects after school. I was not paid for this at the time, but I gained satisfaction in passing on my knowledge in helping others to understand.
I had actually started expressing my desire to become a teacher in middle school. I recognized the joy that I felt when I was able to help my peers understand a new concept, and I saw that the adults who taught my classes were getting paid to do the same thing on a larger scale. Once I had openly expressed my desire to teach to the few people in my friend circle, I was told to seek career aspirations elsewhere, as teachers were not compensated well. Nevertheless, with my lower class upbringing, I figured that a consistent teacher salary was a huge upgrade to the dead-end jobs that my mom and stepdad had to work to put food on the table.
My teaching aspirations were temporarily sidelined once I started high school. Throughout my time in elementary and middle school, I saw the classroom teacher as the ultimate authority in the room who was rarely challenged by students. Students who dared to “talk back” to the teacher were immediately dealt with, either by removal from the classroom or suspension. Therefore, I was astonished to see my classmates raise their voices to our teachers in my high school classes. In my naive mind–a product of that strict Caribbean household, I could not believe that a student would openly disagree with an adult that was trying to help them learn new skills to help them be successful. (Of course, my tenure as a K-12 student was in the 1990s and early 2000s, so obviously times were different, and the “behaviors” that I witnessed are nothing compared to what happens in the schools of today. And I attended what was considered to be one of the worst high schools in my district!)
I suppose you could say that my fear of rejection and confrontation temporarily dissuaded me from pursuing a teaching career. The next few years of high school were pretty uneventful for me. The teasing and mistreatment I dealt with before all but disappeared, but I was still a very shy and socially awkward person who struggled to make friends.
Without my teaching aspirations, I struggled with figuring out what I would do to take care of myself beyond high school. I toyed with many ideas of what I would study in college, from accounting to marketing to IT, but nothing seemed to appeal to me more than teaching.
Despite my lack of direction or plans for the future, I continued to get stellar grades in school, and ultimately graduated high school at the top of my class. I was offered a full scholarship and stipend to attend college a few hours away from home, which seemed like a wonderful opportunity to spread my introverted wings. In reality, a combination of feelings of homesickness and guilt trips from my Jehovah’s Witness friends and family motivated me to return home and attend a local community college.
Being closer to home did little to help me make a firm decision on how to support myself. I had very few ambitions about becoming wealthy and simply wanted to be able to pay my own bills. I ended up changing college majors three or four times during my time as an undergraduate student. Despite the twists and turns in my college journey, I ended up getting my Bachelor’s Degree in four years. I had very little time to bask in my accomplishment, as the reality of finding a stable career in the vague field of “Administrative Management” settled in like the pain that results from bumping your funny bone on the sharp corner of a table. When I did find a somewhat stable job working for a tile manufacturing company, it was one that was only remotely relevant to my college coursework, and the pay was laughably low–even for the mid-to-late 2000s. Now in my early 20s, I had resigned myself to a meager existence of living paycheck to paycheck under my parents’ roof with very little to show for it–until I came to the realization that I had been running away from my dream job…
A few months prior to graduating from college, I had started tutoring and substitute teaching. I found great joy in both of those gigs, and my biggest joy came from helping others to learn something new or grasp a concept that they were having trouble understanding. While substitute teaching, I was frequently assigned to special education classrooms. I enjoyed those assignments the most. I came to the sad realization that I had chosen the wrong major yet again, and it was too late to turn back–or so I thought.
I never forgot about those experiences in the classroom, and despite my determination to find a career in my collegiate field, my overwhelming desire to become an educator was impossible to ignore. While working at my dead-end job, I began researching pathways to teacher certification in my state. To my delight, I discovered a pathway for me to earn my teaching certificate in the state of Georgia while working as a full-time teacher. I was even more elated when I found out I could secure a teaching job in the special education field before taking any teacher certification assessments. I had enjoyed working with students in special education classrooms as a sub teacher the most, so being able to transition from my dead-end job to a more stable career in which I was always interested was like a dream come true. However, I was ill-prepared for the winding journey my teaching career would take…