My Teacher Journey

          Think back to your K-12 schooling experience. What comes to mind? For some, it’ll be their four years of honor roll, the varsity games they played every Tuesday and Friday night, the social events they had the opportunity to attend, and the support they received in the classroom and at home. For others, it may be the job they had to work every day after school, the family problems they had to go home to, their constant lack of resources and support, and the everyday struggle they had to face in the classroom. Every student has a different experience growing up, and a major part of this comes from money. Money is the one thing that humans can agree on and those that don’t have it end up experiencing life much differently than those who do. As teachers, we need to be aware of what money really has to do with it.         According to the article, “The Poverty Myth,” while stereotypes regarding race have been talked about...

    When you think of a teacher, what do you imagine? If you were to ask any student that has found their way through the public education system, the first descriptive words most people would come up with would be "white"and "woman." It is not at all surprising that people would respond this way when you learn that 74.3% of teachers are women and only 25.7% of teachers are men. It is even less surprising when you keep reading and find that "most common ethnicity of teachers is White (68.8%), followed by Hispanic or Latino (12.9%), Black or African American (10.1%) and Other (3.9%)" (Teacher Demographics and Statistics, 2023). The question of how gender affects the teaching profession is one that has been asked for decades because of gender disparities, expectations, and stereotypes that have influenced all aspects of our society, including education.     Because of how gender is embedded in our society today, teachers face wage disparities, stere...

 I have always been the type of person to consider everyone's feelings in a situation and hear every side of the story before coming to conclusions. As much as I’d like to say that yes, I have the full story, I feel as if I never will. A picture can say a million things depending on how you look at it. Growing up, I never paid much attention in history class because I found it boring and repetitive. If you would have asked me to have an in depth discussion about anything from the past, the conversation would not have gone far. The way we’re taught in our public school education shows history as a single narrative story instead of taking into account that there can be other perspectives that haven’t been considered. When students are taught this way, seeing the full picture, or any picture for that matter, can feel impossible because “how could these events that occurred 100 years ago have anything to do with me?”  The article What is settler-colonialism? by Amanda Morris disc...

Since I was a girl, I have always loved helping people. I grew up going back and forth about what I wanted to do with my life, dreaming about being a social worker, nurse, counselor, teacher, and pretty much anything else that involved making a difference. While I loved helping other people, I was never confident enough to ask for help myself. I struggled to keep up with math and science in school, but always excelled at reading and writing. After losing my dad to cancer in 7th grade, school became a daily chore for me to suffer through. I didn’t see the point in learning about the world when my world had been crushed. The next year, my 8th grade English teacher was teaching a unit on poetry. I remember reading a poem that struck me so hard, it brought color back into my world again. At that moment, I decided to turn to writing and created a poem about my life and the mess that I was. When my teacher read it, she cried and asked if she could submit it to a writing contest. I was comple...