Me? A Teacher?

Okay, I'm kinda cheating with this blog. After having read through the first round of blog posts, I wanted to share with you a little bit about why I am an educator.

However, rather than retype something that I'd already done in the past, I kinda snuck down to my first entry back in September and stoled this entry from there, because well, I know you weren't going to read past through all the other stuff I've already written.

So here you go, a little bit about me:

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If you will recall from class, I challenged you to use your first blog entry to give us some insight into why you want to be a teacher. I think with that in mind, it's only fair that I do the same.

See my position is slightly unique from yours in that I'm not currently a teacher by vocation, but rather one by happenstance. However I’m a firm believer that your job should never define you; simply put I am a teacher because I teach.

I began my career actually as a youth minister. That’s right, I spent my days hanging out with young folks like yourself, eating pizza, playing video games, and watching a movie now and then. In reality however I was teaching the entire time. Every moment spent together with someone else is a teaching moment. It’s one of the great things about education – it doesn’t have to happen in a classroom to be.

Our lives present a daily lesson to those around us; our conversations convey truths that we hold to and prompt us to wonder and grow if we will merely listen to beats between the words that we speak.

I am a teacher.

I am an educator.

I am all of these things because I choose to be. I choose to make the world a better place around me. I choose to set myself aside and to think of others around me. I refuse to let ignorance stand and I want to lift others up to my level and give them the things that I have because I am not concerned with making “me” better than “you”.

It is true that knowledge is power. I have a passion to give that power to every man and woman so that their world can be different. Their paths can be brighter.

I realize that all of this can sound like altruistic tripe, but I assure you that it comes from the heart.

One of the things that had a great impact on me growing up was the story of Don Quixote; and further the musical “The Man of La Mancha”. I saw something in Don Quixote that reached to the core of my person and verbalized the feelings that I had inside. Everything that I wanted to be was summed up by these lines:

"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams –this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.” – Man of La Mancha

Why am I a teacher? Because I long to make the wold the place that it should be, and not as it is.