My mission is to inspire and encourage those around me to rise above their fear and choose love – which is best expressed through patience, purity, and perseverance. I strive to create a safe and respectful space where all students can find acceptance, balance, and communication.
As a teacher, I feel it is my great responsibility to help each student learn to accept themselves and the others around them, learn how to think critically and balanced, and to find their own voice. In short, I want to teach acceptance, balance, and communication. With these skills, I hope my students can help create a healthy community and creatively solve whatever problems that they may face in life. This is my own personal journey, as well as my students’.
Acceptance Alleviates Anxiety
From the outside looking in, my family and childhood may have seemed like a picture perfect display of privilege and principle. We were a seemingly-typical white, middle-class, Christian, traditional, suburban family. My community, though not very affluent, was stable, growing, and accepting. My dad was, and still is, a preacher while my mom worked at a childcare, caring for infants. My memories are filled with family vacations with my parents and two older brothers, sporting events, school activities, Vacation Bible School, bike rides around town with my friend, sleepovers, camping trips, barbecues, and TV. Not to say it was a perfect childhood by any means, but the degree of safety, fun, joy, education, encouragement, and love that I experienced built a strong foundation for the man I am today.
Along with this privileged life came some expectations, both from myself and others. I expected the American dream – a life with a loving family, meaningful work, and stable progress. I felt that the people around me expected ambition, success, and purity. Unfortunately, life did not pan out the way everyone expected. At age eleven, I was abused by a close family member, and later by a family friend. This led to many relational setbacks and behavioral problems in high school and college. Later in life, I was devastated by divorce and depression. Luckily for me, I had the strong love, support, and teachings that I received as a young child, both through Oregon City public schools and the weekly Bible classes at my church, to help me stay afloat and emerge strong and motivated. Though, it was not without some fear, doubt, confusion, and shame. It also required me to take responsibility for my own actions, and forgive those who wronged me.
When I think about being a teacher, I know that I must accept myself and my students for who we are right now before there is any progress. I know personally the stress that comes from trauma, and the research is showing that more and more children are coming to school stressed out and often incapable of coping in healthy ways. Through the therapy and healing I have experienced in my own heart and mind, I feel I have a strong understanding of my trauma and how it affected me. I continue to find peace, perspective, and purpose. I have a desire to understand trauma and its effect on students, allowing me to see more than meets the eye. I want to give my students the tools and skills to better understand themselves, the stresses they carry, and how to cope in healthier ways – creating a climate of grace and growth.
I did not come from a diverse or multicultural community, though I was taught to respect and appreciate people with different backgrounds. When I got a chance to travel to China after college and teach English, I felt I got a good education on how another culture, one much different than my own, functioned. I was intrigued and awoken. I soon realized how amazing, big, and complex the world really was. The other travel opportunities I have had – learning German in Germany, teaching English to elementary students in Thailand, and touring around Vietnam, Spain, England, and Mexico – have also added color and depth to my love and understanding of people.
I want to facilitate a responsive and culturally relevant classroom. I want all my students to feel important and cared for. I want to help them construct a worldview that allows them to navigate throughout their lives with peace, confidence, and success. I want to instill in them a growth mindset, helping them to be okay making mistakes and knowing that they can keep pressing forward. I want to teach them how to learn, and give them a situationally and culturally diverse landscape to contemplate, critique, and be creative with. The connectivity, on a global scale, that we now have through technology is exciting. I want my classroom to go beyond the walls of the building, while still giving my students a safe place to explore and take risks. I want to teach to all intelligence profiles and all learning styles, making sure each student gets a strong and balanced education, regardless of their background or abilities.
Acceptance starts with me, and my acceptance of myself. I must be comfortable with the experiences I have had while being excited for the new opportunities before me. I must accept my limitations, mistakes, disappointments, and trauma. With that self-acceptance comes a greater capacity to accept the limitations and traumas faced by my students. On the other hand, I must learn to accept my abilities, growth, and success. Sometimes survivors of trauma tend to see themselves in the worst possible light. The strengths and successes of my students should not only be accepted but celebrated.
Balance Builds Bravery
With all things, I want to bring balance and wisdom. I am constantly learning and maturing along with my students. I do not think it is wise to grab any one philosophy and run with it so far to one extreme that other viewpoints and perspectives are dismissed. I believe the world is vast and complex, yet our human experiences can sometimes seem redundant and monotonous. I take a lot of my wisdom from the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, where the author, King Solomon, says that there is a time for everything, and there is nothing new under the sun. Yet his conclusion is to fear and keep the commandments of an infinite god – a god that is described as love, which is a set of actions and choices that anyone can enact in any given situation. I believe balance builds bravery because balance forces us to step back and look at each perspective. Balance helps us take the safety of what we already know and bravely seek new and better ways to process things. You must balance the finite with the infinite, and that takes bravery.
I feel there are many things to keep balanced in a classroom. When talking about trauma-informed care, there needs to be both availability and accountability. You need to have an interpersonal relationship with the kids while maintaining your instructional responsibilities. There should be grace and growth. I want my students to find peace in solitude while maintaining a strong connection with the society around them. I hope they can see that not only do they need to dream big, but they also need diligent determination to gain the skills to make those dreams come true. I want my students to unify in their uniqueness, which goes back to the acceptance I hope to model.
I feel there are many things to keep balanced in a classroom. When talking about trauma-informed care, there needs to be both availability and accountability. You need to have an interpersonal relationship with the kids while maintaining your instructional responsibilities. There should be grace and growth. I want my students to find peace in solitude while maintaining a strong connection with the society around them. I hope they can see that not only do they need to dream big, but they also need diligent determination to gain the skills to make those dreams come true. I want my students to unify in their uniqueness, which goes back to the acceptance I hope to model.
I want to have a fair proportion of both tradition and technology. There are the facts that can be found in textbooks and the Internet, and there is the feedback given by others and life’s experiences. One cannot rely solely on one but must learn to think critically about the already established facts. I like the idea of Perennialism that says that knowledge and wisdom have been accumulated throughout the ages, yet I can see that, as in Progressivism, allowing students to actively participate and find their own connection with the past will create a firmer grasp of the material and a stronger ability to use it in everyday life. Similarly, the approach of constructivism, which says that students construct an internal meaning through interactions with the world around them, should be balanced with the ideas of critical theory, which forces students to tackle the problems that others around them may face, such as poverty and injustice.
Communication Creates Community
With years of experience teaching English to speakers of other languages, I have come to the conclusion that communication is the key to community. Luckily for most of us, a large part of what we communicate with each other can be understood without saying a word. Yet, I believe that learning lives in language. It is with language that we instruct our students, and it is with language that we assess their growth. It is also with language that we express ourselves and understand the world around us. I hope to find the time and opportunity to teach more academic language and vocabulary into my curriculum – giving my students the tools to talk about the material they are learning. I hope to have the ability and time to help those students who struggle with their English language abilities, giving them a fair shot at grappling with the material.Communication can be so personal, yet it is the thing that holds cultures together. The world is divided by languages. I pray that someday we can see our commonality and create a caring culture around the world. I think technology, such as Skype, Facebook, and online communities like iEARN can play a huge role in that. I want my students to know more about the world and the unique cultures within it. I want them to be able to think creatively, managing new material gracefully and thoughtfully. More importantly, I want them to see that the differences they see in others can be celebrated and that clear, caring communication is crucial.
Along with academic language, I also hope to incorporate songs, stories, and sayings with my students. I also want to give them plenty of opportunities to express themselves through art and play. I believe these things, along with morning meetings and affirmations can help create a stronger classroom community. I believe that if my students can create a caring community within the classroom, then it will be much easier for them to model that to the rest of the world around them.