Growing up, it wasn’t uncommon for me to be in a classroom outside of the regular school hours - whether I was there before, during, or after class - to help my mom. My version of “help” has changed over the years; I used to just sit in her classroom and color while watching VCRs. Once I surpassed third grade and started being older than her students, she put me to work.
I started grading multiplication timetables and spelling tests once I actually knew what was going on. Instead of just sitting in the back of the classroom reading while she taught, she would have me creating examples of art projects or cutting out papers. Then, I moved to grading more serious assignments and arranging work on the walls, especially come back-to-school night.
“Bring your kid to work day” was pretty often for my mom, but I never complained. From a young age, I loved going with her to class and helping her out. I don’t think it ever took much convincing for her to get me to come to work with her.
As I got older, I started to realize the weight of that. When I was young, it never occurred to me that for every spelling test I graded, it was one less for her to do. For me, it was just fun. For her, it's another thing on the neverending list of her responsibilities.
A teacher’s work is never done. Before the first bell rings, she is answering emails and making last minute adjustments to lesson plans. After the final bell rings, she is grading papers and preparing future lesson plans. During the summer, she is reflecting on what she did the previous year and making any improvements that she can.
My mother doesn’t teach the same material every year. At the very least, she tweaks it for the next year. However, more often than not, she is completely reworking lesson plans to find better ways to teach the material.
It really wasn’t until I came to college that I realized I wasn’t just raised by a teacher - I was raised by an amazing teacher. Looking back, so many of my teachers took the easy route, even if it meant that the students didn’t receive the most efficient education. I am completely empathetic to this fact - teaching is hard.
I don’t resent any of my teachers for possibly half-assing their job. Instead, I just learned to appreciate my mother more and more for what she does for her students every year. A large part of me is bitter that I never had my mother as a teacher since my older brother and younger sister had the opportunity. Instead, I take advantage of watching her work now.
Turns out, all those days watching her teach rubbed off a little bit. I always tell people I have the teacher gene, considering my mom and father are teachers, as well as my grandmother, and many other people in my family. While I might be more inclined to patience and empathy, teaching is not actually an ability you can inherit. However, I’ve learned it is something that rubs off on you if you spend over a decade of your life watching it.
Whether she meant to or not, my mom instilled the habits of a teacher in me. Whether or not that helped me with my own classes is unclear, but what is evident is my dedication to education. She taught me to respect teachers and my education. So even when I wasn’t the best at something academically, I still always cared enough to try my best.
Yet now being out of high school, I’m coming to realize the full extent of her influence. Purely coincidentally, I became a swim teacher during high school. I was never a huge swimmer as a child and preferred to float on a noodle than swim laps. I didn’t learn any strokes outside of basic freestyle, which I never really mastered. So applying for a job as a swim instructor seemed weird to me, yet the employers reassured me that they would teach me how to teach the strokes.
Although I had never swam these strokes in my life, after watching other instructors teach them to the kids, I picked it up. Suddenly, I was teaching kids how to perfect the strokes that I couldn’t even do myself. It all comes down to my ease of teaching.
Once I got older, my mom was able to leave me in charge of the classroom for small periods of time, mostly so she could have time to go to the bathroom. She never taught me how to teach the class - I just imitated what I watched her do for all those years. Teaching the swim lessons was the same thing - the hardest part about that job for most people is not teaching the strokes, its teaching children.
There are many people at my work who swim competitively on the swim team and can perform the strokes themselves with stunning accuracy. Yet they don’t have the same experience teaching as I do. My lack of experience swimming is balanced out by my experience teaching.
The older I got, the more my mom tried to steer me clear of following in her footsteps. Her job might be emotionally rewarding, but seeing her students learn and grow is really the only thing she gets out of her job. I never seriously considered becoming a teacher, because she low-key wouldn’t let me. While teaching is arguably the most important job in modern society, the fact of the matter is it doesn’t pay well enough for the work. I always viewed teaching as a back-up plan, that I knew I could fall into if I couldn’t find another job.
But that’s all it was: a fallback - something I knew I could get a degree for and find a job. My perspective completely changed towards the middle of last semester. For the first time ever, I had an epiphany that teaching might be my next step in life. A lot happened leading up to that epiphany - I rediscovered how much I loved learning, how much I missed “real” school after attending online school for two years. As I watched my favorite professor teach my favorite class about my favorite subject, I realized how much I wanted to do what she was doing. Once that thought occured to me, I haven’t been able to forget it.
So now nineteen years later, about thirteen of which I spent in a classroom - whether it was mine or my mother’s - I’m actively pursuing a career in education. This probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. This epiphany was pretty inevitable. It took tutoring a football player in my math class this semester for it to really hit home - I was raised in a classroom, and it looks like I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon.
