A Childhood Dream, Fulfilled

I always wanted to be a teacher. Now I am, though not in the way I thought I'd be.

When they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said “teacher.” I was in preschool, and the most aspirational profession, in my eyes, was to help people learn things.

I’m not sure how my fixation on teaching started, but I can trace it all the way back to when I was 3 or 4 years old, as is documented in the preschool yearbook. And I was still saying the same thing in fifth grade many years later, as is recorded in that yearbook as well.

The snippet from my preschool yearbook.

To be fair, I had a lot of excellent teachers growing up. I wanted to be just like Mrs. Dascenzo, who always had something nice or interesting to say about my writing and taught us little jingles to remember spelling and grammar conventions. Or Mrs. Mussell, who danced around the classroom in her Green Bay Packers cheese hat on game day, which was especially funny to our group of metro Detroit-area third graders. Or Mr. Modrzejewski, who always had lots of jokes, kept pet lizards in the classroom, and tricked us into thinking his family owned the company that made Mod Podge (since we called him Mr. Mod for short).

My teachers were some of the most vivid and interesting characters in my young life. I don’t remember everything they taught us (especially the boring stuff), but I clearly remember how much I looked up to them. Young me thought it would be just peachy if I could go off to college one day and then become a teacher myself. I wanted to help the next generation of kiddos learn to read and write — and go on cool field trips sometimes.

But things changed when I got to middle school. A lot of my tweenage peers were totally tapped out on academics and seemed to love finding ways to make their teacher’s jobs difficult. They’d blurt out rude comments during a lecture, show up late to class on purpose, or pull pranks on other kids when we were supposed to be working on class projects.

In middle school, learning wasn’t “cool.” And if you showed any signs of enjoying the classroom material, you just made yourself a target for bullying. So while I still enjoyed academics, I tried to not make them a core part of my personality.

Some kids even bullied teachers as well. I have several memories of seeing my teachers at their wits end just trying to get kids to stop causing a ruckus during class. The level of disrespect for their leadership disturbed me enough to start thinking teaching might not what I want to do after all.

Even at 11 years old, I knew there was no way in hell I’d willingly set foot in a middle school again after graduating 8th grade. Like, what if I became a teacher and had to teach kids like that? So by freshman year of high school, I’d abandoned my teaching dreams.

My answer changed slightly in fifth grade. I wanted to be a teacher AND a writer.

I think that was a wise choice on multiple levels — the main one being that the amount of shit teachers have to deal with on a daily basis is far beyond my threshold of tolerance. The critical work of shepherding young people through the education system while dealing with funding cuts, internal/external politics, and the opinions of nosy parents warrant today’s teachers the utmost respect (and, in most cases, a huge salary increase). But alas, that path was not for me, and I knew it at a young age.

In college, I pursued journalism instead of education — another field renowned for its stability and great pay (kidding, kidding). Even with my divergence into the world of media, a desire to teach still nagged at my core.

In some ways, I’ve even seen my role as a journalist as that of an educator. My favorite articles I’ve written for mainstream publications aren’t hard-hitting investigations or crime chronicles. Rather, they’re stories about people doing cool things or making ingenious discoveries. They’re the kinds of stories that spark curiosity and help you learn something new about the world.

Curiosity and a love of storytelling are the main reasons I got into journalism in the first place. And who else is great at sparking curiosity and telling stories? Teachers.

Young me did not have an expansive view of what being a teacher could actually look like in practice. I thought I had to be in a classroom, where I’d formally instruct young people about predetermined topics. I’d assign classroom activities and homework. I’d grade papers and stay late doing parent-teacher conferences. A teacher was someone who worked in a school and maybe slept in a school too. (Did they even go home at the end of the day? I remember speculating about this with my peers in early elementary school, because we never saw our teachers anywhere else.)

But as I got older, I learned from teachers who didn’t fit the classic “teacher” profile. I had coaches on my high school forensics team, editors at my college newspaper, and mentors at my media internships. Those were also people that I looked up to and learned from. They were teachers to me, even if they didn’t instruct in a formal, classroom setting.

Somewhere along the way I realized I could be a mentor for others, and it wouldn’t require going back to school for an education degree. I already had in me what I needed to be a good teacher. It would just take some time to learn how to put my skills into practice.

Now, years later, I’ve figured out how to be the teacher I always wanted to be without the limitations of being in a classroom. People around me are always looking for spaces to connect with others, create, and learn new skills. It took me a long time to recognize that I have the power in me to build spaces where they can do just that.

I just came off a really busy week of teaching, which is what made me step back and realize how far I’ve come. On Wednesday, I led a zine workshop at The Sheboygan Collective and on Saturday I led a lakeside walk and corresponding writing session at WordHaven BookHouse. The thing that struck me from both events was how grateful the participants were to be there. Everyone seemed to get something different out of being present, and expressed so much gratitude that they’d had an opportunity to connect and create with others.

And that, readers, is what I’ve realized is so important about my role as a teacher. It’s not about being a whiz on a certain topic or at sharing instructions on how to do something — though those things do matter. What keeps me coming back to these teaching gigs is seeing people’s faces light up when they learn something new or get to joyfully experience something that I enjoy, too.

It’s the connections I make with my returning students and the people who graciously let me teach at their establishments (shoutout to Whitney at TSC and CJ at WH). It’s the community of people I’ve met through sharing the things that I love. And the satisfaction I get from creating opportunities for my community that otherwise may not exist.

For a long time, I never thought I’d become a teacher. Now that I am, I wish I could go back and tell my young self:

Don’t worry, you’ll get there — even though ‘there’ doesn’t look like what you’re expecting. In fact, it’s even better.

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