Really?

I love kids. I love history. I love working with people. Why not put the three together?

That was my thought process as I approached high school graduation and looked towards my future at the University of Michigan. Once I arrived on campus I quickly made the decision to pursue a career in education with concentrations in history and social studies. Since history and social studies are both middle school plus classes, I entered the track to complete my secondary certification.

I have some experience working with little kids, but really not a lot. Most of my time was spent working with kids 12 years or older, and once in college I spent most of my time working with kids that age and older because I was on track to do the secondary certification, and I wanted as much experience as possible with that age range.

Teaching isn’t easy. Each kid, each age range, each class comes with difficulties. However, I can counter many of these issues with what I learned in college classes, and what I learned in my education classes in college was how to teach and deal with students between the ages of 12 and 18 years old (secondary).

I have experience teaching kids whose second language is English. I taught both an English class and 3 social studies classes in Honduras for 6 months. I’ve also completed a TEFL course, which teaches you how to teach English as a second language.

Now combine all of these paragraphs above into one idea—my experience and my training and my passion to work with kids.

Now, picture this: me, in a classroom, with 8 six-year olds and one four-year old feeling completely helpless as students are talking extremely loud in Spanish, not listening/understanding anything I say in English, crawling on the floor, standing on their chairs, etc. etc.

Talk about a learning experience and a rough day at the office.