“I
bet you could fit into this locker,” my eight year old self said to my younger
sister. “Don’t worry, I have my combination here, I’ll let you back out!” As
luck would have it, the locker that was assigned to me for my third grade year was
at the end of the hallway one floor directly above my mother’s new classroom,
so it was a short run down to her to explain in a panic how I had locked
Chassey into my new locker and couldn’t get her out. My mom had taught before I
was born but this was the first time in my memory that she was going to be a
teacher and so, the beginning of my own journey.
Being the middle
child of two teachers who had both just taken jobs in USD 494 meant that I
spent a lot of my free time running up and down the hallways of the elementary
and high school, terrorizing janitors and pestering my parents coworkers. I was
never shy or timid as a child and any friend, acquaintance, or friendly
stranger of my parents became my immediate friend. My parents never bothered
giving me the speech about not speaking to strangers for many reasons, but mainly
because they were confident that anyone who decided to kidnap me would bring me
back within the same day, tired of being hassled. I was loved as a child, and
yet while I knew that I was loved I still never really fit into my role in my
family. In my mind I was always at least ten years older than I really was and
knew way more than my little kid britches could hold. I loved to sing and
dance, loudly, for anyone that would watch and as an eight year old I wanted to
be a high school cheerleader more than anything else. I knew that I was
different than most people, because I always felt so much older than anyone
else my age, but for the most part I was a happy kid. My third grade teacher
was Ms. Kalinoski and on the evenings when my mom had too many papers to grade
my sister and I would go over to Ms. K’s house and hang out with her.
Eventually she started letting me help her with her grading. I graded so many
papers and it didn’t matter to me at all that these were the papers of my
peers, or that I now knew sensitive information about them; I could have cared
less about the grades of my peers, but I so enjoyed using that red pen to
notate an error or to draw a smiley face at the top of the page.
My parents got
divorced a few years after my third grade year; I honestly could not tell you
when exactly, as it just wasn’t an important event in my life. At the end of my
seventh grade year my mom and I decided that I would attend a private Christian
school in our town. I had just gone through cheer tryouts and made it for the
second year in a row but I was miserable in school; it was hard to be a true
trouble-maker when your mom was on the other end of the building that connected
the high school to the elementary and always just one e-mail away. With a sad
heart I explained why I had chosen to enroll in another school and handed back
my uniform.
The public school
in Syracuse, KS at that time was a 1A school and the private school that had
just reopened after over 10 years was even smaller. First through twelfth
grades were all in the same room and there was approximately 25 of us in all. I
had gone to church with some of the other kids for years and a few others had
gone to public school with me, so it was not a scary transition but a welcome
one, and my best friend was there too. I was twelve and Maggie was sixteen and
she was one of the most confident, laid back, grown up sixteen year olds that I
had ever known. A lot of the confidence that I have in myself today is due to
the friendship with Maggie that we still maintain today. I completed two years
at Syracuse Christian Academy before my mom remarried and we moved to Udall, a
small town that none of us had ever heard before and didn’t sound too
promising. The two years in private school had allowed me to surpass all of the
students my age and I spent the last three years of high school struggling to
even find anything to do. After a blow out between the principal and I where he
suggested that maybe I drop out of school my mom once again stepped in to save
the day. They agreed that I would be allowed to spend the mornings in the
elementary with her and her classroom, tutoring children to read and acting as
an aide for my mom that ran errands or graded papers. Despite the fact that my
mom and I had stopped being really close years before because of my attitude
towards adult instruction I had still spent every summer helping prepare her
classroom for a new group of students and spent a lot of my lunch breaks in her
room surfing the internet on her computers, so it was an agreeable suggestion
to me that I spend my mornings with her. The first time that I helped a girl
learn to read changed my life; not to say that I suddenly started being any
less stubborn and troublesome, but I knew then that I had to finish high school
so that I could go on and do something great with my life, and become a
teacher. Starting my junior year of high school I started enrolling in college
classes at the community college a few towns away and by the end of my senior
year I had almost finished my freshman year of college.
Despite the fact
that I had found my calling in education, college became a struggle for me just
as high school had. I didn’t want to continue with classes because I was so
bored and if I had to hear, “because that’s how it is,” one more time when I
asked my adviser why I had to take so many lame classes just to be a teacher, I
was going to scream. My supportive mom agreed that maybe it was best that I
took a few years off from school to get my life figured out and so I
immediately withdrew from my classes and moved out of the dorms into an
apartment by myself. Maybe I didn’t want to teach after all? I started working
in a hotel and I loved the business aspect of it all, I loved the guests that
came from all over to attend business in Wichita and I started dreaming of
going back to school for business administration instead of education. After a
few months of living in Winfield, Kansas, I moved on to bigger and better
things by getting an apartment in Wichita. I started a job working at GMAC
Financial and found out that they offered to pay for higher education, as long
as I was willing to go into business. I toyed with the idea for awhile,
fascinated by all the challenges that would be offered to me if I did something
new and exciting. I enrolled back into college but didn’t declare any major, I
just took some classes. I had finally grown up enough to realize that even if I
hated it with all of my might; I still had to take college algebra. First
though, I had to take an entrance class, because it had been years since I had
even looked at a calculator and knew that I wouldn’t be able to pass algebra
without a precursor first. My Introduction to College Algebra class once again
opened my eyes to the beauty of learning. I realized that all that we were
doing was learning different methods to solve the same problem and that by
doing so the professor was giving everyone a chance to solve the problem in
their own way; it was genius. I declared myself an education major once more.
I could not now
look at my life and my future and see myself anywhere except in a classroom. My
earliest memories of life and learning started in that hallway when I closed my
sister inside of that locker and I want my last memories to be in a similar
hallway, doing what I do best.
