So this is a blog post from my older blog that I actually really enjoyed writing so being a little bit of a cheat here and transferring it onto this blog I hope you enjoy.
Good question!
A lot of people who I have come across throughout my life have posed this exact question to me, why do you want to teach? And I suppose people tend to think it’s quite a simple question to answer, but what if the question was posed to you about your job or your aspired career choice? What would you say?
Believe it or not when I was younger and you used to have those chats with friends about what you wanted to be when you grew up, I wanted to be a vet. The idea being that animals can’t talk to tell us what’s wrong and I wanted to be able to help them (yes I realise how cheesy this sounds but I was young okay haha). I experienced a complete 180 when I actually did some work experience in a veterinary surgery and I came across the realities of that job, losing pets and having to consolidate pet owners when their family member didn’t make it or had become seriously ill. I knew in myself that I wouldn’t be able to deal with the problems faced by the nurses and vets as well as they could day in day out so then it came to Plan B…but that was a little more difficult as I didn’t have one! I had been so set on becoming a vet that it never dawned on me that it wouldn’t be my lifelong career.
During my time in secondary school and college, several teachers had said to me that they could see me becoming a teacher later in life. They reckoned I had what’s needed…I am still yet to know what that is! Bit like an X Factor that people need to be able to teach, and in the beginning I dismissed the idea quite quickly! I couldn’t have thought of anything worse than having a class full of children who you had to convince that learning was actually fun. But then having more and more time to think about it, some of the most influential people in my life have been my teachers and people always remember them (albeit for good or bad reasons) so why couldn’t I do it? Why couldn’t I be that inspiration for others? Even if I only made a difference to one child’s life, then that would be my job fulfilled. So there was my plan B!
Since college I have had the pleasure of doing a year apprenticeship in a local primary school as a learning support assistant which I can honestly say was probably the best year of my life! It totally confirmed for me that teaching was the right choice and perhaps allowed me to maybe understand what it was my own teachers were talking about! I completely felt at home in the classroom environment even without having worked in one before! My instincts took over with a lot of great support and advice from the staff I worked closely with. So here I now am on the road to completing my degree at university so that I can train to be able to have the chance to change people’s lives for the better!
Do you have a similar story with your job aspirations? Or total opposite and have no idea? Leave any comments below.
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