There are many pathways and motivations in the decision to choose education as a career. For some, teaching is an innate quality that seemingly comes naturally. This chapter tells the story of this author's identity development as a teacher and lifelong learner from playing pretend schoolteacher to professor of graduate teacher education candidates. Told through the eyes of the author, and contextualized with memories and perspectives of others, this is the story of the early influential experiences that led to education as a career pathway, the loneliness of being a beginning teacher, the tribulations of young children cracking the code of literacy in elementary classrooms, the growing awareness of the inequities in our education system as a teacher leader, and the struggle to maintain an identity as a practitioner in academia. Along the way, the author highlights life lessons learned in each phase and how they aided her along her career path to higher education.
TopInfluential Early Experiences
By four years of age, I was an early reader and writer and wanted to share my skills with others. According to my mom, I began displaying teaching and leadership skills at a very young age while playing with neighborhood friends.
One day, Jennifer set up little kid chairs in front of a stand-alone chalkboard and told Robby, his brother, and two other neighborhood children that she was the teacher and would teach them how to read and write. She stood in front of them and wrote letters and three letter words on the board, having the children say the letter names and sounds and read the words. It was that day that Robby’s mother told me Jennifer was definitely going to be a teacher.
When I was seven years old, my sister, Heidi, was born, and as she got older my mom claimed that I had my own “in-house student.” When we played “school,” I was always the teacher, whether in the house, the yard, or other places in our community, imitating the instructional approaches used by my teachers. I instructed her to sit tall at my desk, trace the letters of her name, and identify the letters of the alphabet. Occasionally, our role playing as teacher and student even involved field trips. For example, I turned our weekly grocery shopping into a learning experience by pushing my sister around in a shopping cart, naming fruits and vegetables in the produce department, and examining their characteristics. My sister explains that these early experiences sparked her imagination, curiosity, and love of literacy. “Whether it was role playing teacher/student, learning my alphabet, writing my name, or simply reading a book to me when I snuck into her room at night, . . . moments like this encouraged me to enjoy reading and learning.” Apparently, teaching was “in my bones” early in my life as I had begun to broadly explore the role of a teacher in my early childhood play.