My journey to becoming a teacher
My teaching career began in a jungle. Not the concrete one full of noise and hustle but the literal jungle. My classroom was on top of a hill that looked down upon thatched roofs, banana trees and limestone peaks dotted with dense foliage.
Becoming a career teacher wasn’t something that I planned for or even expected, but through a series of choices as a young adult, it was a path that began to form and continues to twist and turn still today.
When I was 23, I left all that I knew in the US to work as a volunteer English teacher in a refugee camp on the Thailand/Burma border. I can’t say that I really understood what I was going to be doing nor was I educated as a teacher at this point. But I knew it was a chance I had to take. My best friend who was already working in another refugee camp assured me of this.
Over the coming 16 months in rural Thailand, I certainly found out what it meant to be a teacher and a teacher is what I decided I wanted to be. My work seemed simple: help upgrade English levels for students, who were continuing their education after high school. I had spoken and studied English my entire life. Surely, I could find ways to help others learn my mother tongue.
As I think about it now, it was of course anything but simple. In some ways, it was down right ridiculous. And it was what got me hooked on teaching. The less direction there is and the more responsibility I have, the more intriguing I seem to find it, almost like it is a puzzle that has to be both created and solved. There has to be a way to succeed, and you trust me to find the way.
To get started I had to figure out what now, what next and why does it even matter, which are questions that continue to guide me today, but ones that left me vexed as I first stood in front of my first two classes of students.
Those first days and weeks I started by reflecting back on experiences I had had in school that I felt were purposeful and used those as a compass to help guide me. What was it that made school feel worthwhile? The memories of former teachers, academic successes and trials flooded back and gave insights into what I should do and also what I shouldn’t.
Analyzing the experiences that had had the greatest success, I could see some similarities between them that could at least help me get started. I have since realized these similarities were core values – something that is rooted in all the learning I design whether it be for children or adults.
- Creativity: teachers who had engaged me well were creative in how they got us to learn.
- Inquiry based: teachers shared the responsibility of learning with us and helped us build on what we knew.
- Relevant: teachers grounded the learning in the world around us and helped us understand why it even mattered.
- Social connection: teachers connected us through learning and made these experiences fun.
Over the months, my students validated my conclusions with the feedback they gave on the work we were doing. This way of teaching was different to what they knew, and it was working. I ultimately realized that as the teacher, I had the power to take this understanding and apply it to all of my design. I had the power to make learning more enjoyable and purposeful. I had the power to make learning more meaningful and fun. I had the power to reshape how people experience school.
It was these realizations and validations that propelled me to pursue a career in education. I could contribute to making a change. Despite initially feeling like an imposter, I left the jungle not only knowing that I was a teacher but knowing my purpose. Now I just had to go back to school to make it official.
