FROM TEACHER TO TEACHING

It is eye-opening for me to look back on my goals from when I applied to the Master of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET) program two and a half years ago.  My primary goal was to make myself more marketable in order to obtain a classroom teaching position.  My job at that time provided me with opportunities to learn about the development and motivation of children and adolescents, but was not the teaching position I desperately wanted.  I hoped that enrolling in the MAET program would enable me to acquire skills that would help me keep pace with the evolving educational landscape and, thus, be a more attractive candidate for teaching positions.  I also had secondary goals to learn how to use technology to be a more effective teacher and to become more intentional in selecting the best pedagogical strategy and supporting tools to compose successful lesson plans.  While I genuinely wanted to make a difference in students’ lives, my goals focused first on my desire to be a teacher, with my hypothetical students being a secondary focus.

I am a different person today.  My current goals are similar, yet vastly altered from what they once were.  My primary goal is to help students grow academically and personally, and to evolve in to leaders.  I want youth to acquire the skills they will need to be able to fulfill their dreams and make a difference in others’ lives.  Because of that goal, I want to teach and, thus, want to be an attractive candidate for prospective employers in the education world.  I also want to be effective at teaching academic content and skills so that I can achieve my principal goal of helping students learn and evolve.  In order to be a successful teacher, I have the secondary goals of staying up-to-date on current technology, content, and pedagogical resources; and being intentional in finding the sweet spot of content, pedagogy, and technology when developing lesson plans.  In other words, my goals today are focused first on students, rather than on myself.  To borrow phrasing from actor Bradley Whitford (2004), I want to teach more than I want to be a teacher.

My goals have evolved for a combination of reasons.  Volunteering with students participating in a history program allowed me to experience the joy of watching them grow.  I have progressed through several jobs; each experience helped me learn new skills, mature, and better understand my passions.  As my faith and relationship with God has evolved, I have grown in recognizing there are things more important than gaining my dream job solely for my own benefit.  Most recently, a friend shared a truth from his life that “if you’re not moving forward, you’re falling backwards.”  This sentiment has changed how I approach my daily and long-term decisions, and made me realize that the choice to persevere is one that I want students to learn for their own benefit.  My goals will surely continue to evolve over time, influenced by people and circumstances, hopefully always in a positive direction, as they have in the past few years.