The Art of Education

For as long as I can remember, I've loved the idea of being a teacher. I've admired how they transition lesson plans, have knowledge of multiple different subjects, and continue to find pleasure in teaching the exact same curriculum year after year. Not only do they get to experience new kids every fall, but they also receive new materials to help get the message across to the students.

Next to my interest in teaching, I also found an interest in education and learning. Although the assignments and projects piled on year after year took the toll on my anxiety level, I still found myself loving the process. Teacher teaches students a lesson, students do an assignment at home on the lesson, teacher helps students further understand the lesson with classroom activities and examples, and then the students are tested on the material, only to forget everything the following week.

As much as I've loved the idea of education, I've never really felt...gifted at it. Yes, I valued A's and B's as much as the student sitting next to me in class, but I never seemed to feel enough. For whatever reason, I've always felt slightly behind the level of education compared to a good chunk of my classmates.

Many of my friends in elementary and middle school did exceptionally well in the class, making everything seem like a walk in the park. This both discouraged me and encouraged me at the exact same time. Each time I did horrible on a test or an assignment, I felt like I had to hide my mistake from my friends and not let them know I'm a typical imperfect human being. Cause showing my imperfections to my friends seemed like social suicide, even though I knew they'd always be my friends no matter what. In the encouragement sense, I really did value the fact that I could have intelligent friends to rely on and not people who would make terrible decisions or act dumb around me.

This ended up continuing in high school to my overwhelming horror and pleasure. I found an incredibly wonderful and intelligent group of friends who made me feel hilarious and charming, but stupid and boring at the same time. Like my previous years of schooling, many of my friends scored abnormally high on exams, assignments, and projects than I typically did. This ended up dissolving some of my passion for learning because I never felt that I was worthy of being their friend.

Compared to the average human being at my school, I've been an above average student for all my life. To me, that's just never seemed to be enough. Not good enough, not smart enough, not cool enough, not intelligent enough, not correct enough. I've always felt behind the times and didn't connect to and understand as easily as many of my friends did in school. I found myself struggling time after time to memorize things that happened during everyday life that I didn't know about. My memory seems to me like an unworthy symbol of my life. I've always felt there had to be a limit on how many memories I can hold, because I've become too forgetful to be considered normal.

"How can you not know that?"
"Wait, you didn't know this? I learned that in like 4th grade!"
"Were you born in a barn?"
"Yeah, my dad told me that when I was like seven."

And now that I'm being transitioned into the life of a college student as an eighteen-year-old, I'm wondering if it's ever going to stop. To me, adults have always seemed so much more knowledgeable and more in tuned to the world and what's happening. Will I ever get there? Will I be able to know things that other people don't know? Will I be able to teach my kids life lessons someday? Will they know more than me at some point?

My annoying anxiety monster likes to whisper these questions of concern in my ear as much as possible, paralyzing me with much deeper worry than what's normally on the surface.

It's strange to think that my level of concern for this doesn't surpass my passion for learning and education. Even though I struggle to remember things and know more things than an average person my age, I still feel a deep yearning to teach kids.

I want that part of their life to matter.
I want school to be something loved and not hated.
I want students to get something out of my class that they'll be able to take with them for the rest of their life.
I don't want this to feel like a burden kids need to jump through.
I want kids to be excited to come everyday and to have an education.


But most of all, I just want to make a difference.