Why I Want to be a Teacher
By: Colleen
When I was in grade one, there was job day in my class. All sorts of professions were represented with fun displays and knowledgeable speakers. I searched through the stations looking for something that held interest.
I found many jobs that I knew right away were not for me: accountant (numbers put me to sleep), race car driver (too fast), geologist (too slow), astronaut (too far to commute every day)… Then I found some jobs that I would have liked to have, but I knew I was not cut out for: ballerina (pink makes me look washed out), florist (most plants give me hay fever), surgeon (the smell of blood makes me queasy)… The list went on.
All around me my friends were finding their dream jobs, while I could do nothing more than look on. Nothing seemed to fit me and my interests. Despondent, I left the classroom and went to my favourite place in the school.
I could sit in the library for hours, looking through the stacks of books and magazines at the glossy pictures and the words. Those wonderful words. I found, in my almost daily trips to the library, that I loved to read. I read voraciously, anything I could find; everything from children’s fiction to the Encyclopedia Britannica. I still do.
I love the feeling that reading gives me: the feeling that I am learning. Learning gives me the biggest thrill, it makes me feel unstoppable. Not only do I feel smarter, but I can look at the world with enlightened eyes. I can see the world with an educated and questioning perspective and be able to actively pursue my own answers. I have power over my mind and opinions because knowledge is power, and being able to share that power, that knowledge, would be the nicest job I can think of.
“Gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche,” wrote Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, and I find that this holds truth for me. I will love teaching as much as I love learning, and I’ve heard it said that you learn as much from your pupils as they learn from you. It seems to be a win-win situation for everyone.
As a teacher, I would be able to share the knowledge that I have gained with the future generations (these generations, of course, will inherit everything I have worked for, everything I have accomplished when I am gone, and I wish that they be the best prepared to handle it).
I think everyone has unique views formed from individual experiences and beliefs. If there is a way to share this uniqueness to better the abilities of the next generation, I would like to try it.
These are only emotional reasons why I wish to become a teacher. There are many practical reasons as well.
I hope one day to have a family, and I think that a teacher’s schedule would best fit me if I were to have the children I hope to have, with the same holidays off and roughly the same hours at school.
A teacher is usually able to find work in the same region in which they live, which translates to a local job.
Teaching offers many wonderful options for the more adventurous individual (me). A teacher can travel the world and teach in many different places for many different reasons. I have come to understand that English teachers are in demand in many Asian countries at the current time, and I know that there are usually teaching positions available if one is willing to travel somewhere less fortunate to teach with a social justice charity.
“Teacher” might sound like a basic word, but I think the concepts and actual practice of teaching runs much deeper than its surface appearance. To instill knowledge into the children that will grow up to run our world, to be able to be close to the people I love and to help make the world a better place that I will be able to experience in many different ways is a job that I am willing to take.
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