Ok, guys. I could be posting about our Disneyland trip. I could be posting about taking Ella to see Disney on Ice today. But instead, I’m posting a big thought. A BIG THOUGHT.
And I want feedback.
Ready? (…wait for it…)
I think I’m going to go back to school.
Just typing that out makes me want to duck in anticipation of the WTF?s that will come flying out of the computer. After all, I just finished school. A lot of school. I can actually say that I’m more educated than most of the people in the country. So why…in the hell…would I want to go back?
I’ll let you guys in on a little secret. Actually, most people around me in my real life know that this isn’t a secret at all, but I don’t post about it on the blog too much because I’ve been applying to jobs and didn’t want this info out there. Since nobody is beating down my door at the moment, however, it’s a good day for a revelation.
You know how I went to law school and came out and just threw my hands up in the air? Here’s the facts: the problem isn’t that I don’t know what I want to do with my life. Even though I’ve gone on and on, wondering what I’m supposed to be doing, I actually know exactly what I want to be doing. I’ve known it for years. I just didn’t trust it enough to actually do it.
No, it isn’t writing. It isn’t blogging. It isn’t photography. It’s not even being a stay-at-home mom. (Although, how awesome would that be?! C’est la vie, in another life…)
What I want to do and have wanted to do for years now is very simple. I want to be a teacher.
Doesn’t that just make no sense whatsoever? Who goes to law school if they want to be a teacher? Well, here’s what happened. I was a teacher. I took a year off in college and was a substitute teacher here in Utah when I was 19, because I knew that’s what I wanted to do and I wanted to experience it first hand before I studied it.
Result? Baptism by fire. All I got was a 30 minute speech on how to avoid getting injured by a student and then I was allowed to teach any K-12 classroom I selected. I bounced from school to school and had no idea what I was doing. I loved it, but I was also nervous, unprepared, and clueless. I didn’t know how to discipline students or manage a classroom or deal with the high school kids who hit on me (which isn’t surprising, since I was their age). So, after a year, I burnt out and gave up. I decided that I didn’t have it in me to be a teacher and I ended up with an English degree instead.
The thing is, I never lost the interest in teaching. Even as I was getting my English degree, I was working as a children’s bookseller, making reading lists and showcasing the books that really got kids reading. And when I went to law school, I ended up leaning towards education law and then got a job working with Ohio schools. By the time I lost my job last summer, I had spent three years in classrooms, using the stuff I learned in law school to teach teachers how to deal with conflicts between students and showing students how to talk to each other to avoid violence.
And I LOVED it.
So now? Well, now I’m in Utah and the work that I was doing with conflict in schools doesn’t exist. I’m a friggin’ expert at it, but it doesn’t exist. And every time I hear that someone gets to wake up every morning and stand in front of a classroom of students, helping them reach their best selves, I feel so jealous I can actually taste it.
I’m desperate to teach.
BUT…
There’s that whole going back to school thing. We have so much debt from my student loans that I’ll honestly be paying it off for the rest of my life. At a certain point, it has to be irresponsible to go back.
There’s also the problem of me being too passionate about schools. Trouble students and problems with teachers used to suck the life out of me in my last job and I’d often come home stressed and upset. When I was actually working as a teacher, I had to work a second job because I was spending all my money on extra supplies and things for the classroom. So there’s the possibility that being a teacher would actually be bad for me.
I’m at a crossroads. If I’m going to be a teacher, I need to apply this spring so that I can get my Masters in Education in two years from the University of Utah and if I’m not going to be a teacher I need to find a way to pull my brain out of the classroom once and for all.
What to do…what to do…


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Ok, guys. I could be posting about our Disneyland trip. I could
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