I love to learn. I always have -- my husband tells me that he can't even fathom how my brain works, that I seem to be thinking about so much all the time, that I read so many different things all the time, and it totally amazes him. I don't see it that way -- I'm just curious about a lot of things, so I read about them when I have time. It's that simple.
With that in mind, I've never really left school.
I earned my Master's in English Education in 2012, and spent my first year in the classroom in 2012-2013. During the summer of 2013, I took a class in Banned Young Adult Literature and Criticism, where I read 16 books in 8 weeks and learned a lot of awesome new stuff to build my classroom.
The next year, I decided that, someday, I might want to be an administrator, so I started taking classes in Educational Administration. That was Spring and Summer 2014. After about 9 credit hours, I realized that this was just not for me -- I didn't like how removed from students it seemed, and I wasn't willing to give that up.
But I wanted to keep learning. I spent a lot of time thinking about what my future might hold -- did I want to stay a classroom teacher and get another degree in just English? After all, a wider knowledge base of literature and writing could be a fabulous way to enrich my classroom. Then I wondered: Did I want to get certified in another field? Maybe history, or art? But those jobs are hard to get, and then I was still in the classroom but my knowledge base wouldn't be as strong.
Before long, I realized that I don't want to be in the classroom for the rest of my life. I love teaching, and I'm lucky to do a job I like, but I get bored easily. This year, for example, I'm teaching a new class, and I'm super excited because otherwise I've been teaching the same classes for 3+ years running. The chances of my changing classes every few years is low, and I have enough credit hours where I need them to teach senior-level, college credit classes, which means that's where I'm stuck, a little.
And I hate grading :) There's a lot of that as a Language Arts teacher.
I started thinking about Counseling in the spring of 2014, when a student in my school killed herself. There was an enormous fall-out -- several students were hospitalized for suicidal thoughts, and there was an outpouring of support and grief. But all that faded by the time school let out for the summer -- barely a month later.
I knew in my heart that, while students may have stopped talking about their struggles so publicly, there was no question that those struggles were continuing.
And come fall, suddenly I had those students in my classroom, and I found myself as a confidante for a variety of students who needed someone to trust, someone to talk to.
And I realized that perhaps I could do a lot of good as a counselor.
I hesitated -- my mother in law was a high school counselor for over 30 years, and while she's a wonderful person, I don't want to be her.
I quickly realized that if THAT was my only hesitation, it wasn't a very good reason to say no to something I think could be really helpful and fulfilling.
In Fall 2014, I applied to one of the top counseling programs in the country, and I'm now working toward becoming a Secondary School Counselor.
I'm learning constantly, and I'm changing constantly. New ideas produce new reactions. The way I'm teaching has adjusted to make room for those changes. I'm loving the experience of becoming a better person, of being challenged all the time in how I think and how I handle situations.
But on nights like tonight, where I'm just barely into my school year, I'm already behind on my grading, I had 120+ pages to read for homework and only got through about 85 of it before I fell asleep, on nights like this I have to remind myself that this is a choice.
If I wanted to, I could walk out tonight and never go back. Never write another paper, never read another textbook, never give another presentation, never build another research bibliography, unless I wanted to.
But I want to learn.
I'm making a choice to better myself, to invest in my future and in the future of my students.
It'll be about 5 more years before this degree is done, and by that time I'll have been in my classroom for close to ten years. I'm not sure yet what I'll do with it yet -- I may stay in the classroom and use my counseling skills to help students as I teach, and I may start applying for jobs where I would leave the classroom and be a full-time counselor.
I don't know yet, but I have time. For now, all I have to do is keep learning.
Now, if I could only add another hour or two to my day so I could get my homework AND my grading done...
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