Keep Pushing

I didn't get the first job.  It's okay and I'm okay.

Source

I did get something else out of the experience that has really made the whole process worthwhile.  I remember sitting in student teaching seminar listening to my other classmates get emotional about how they finally feel like they have discovered the thing in life that they were meant to do.

I didn't feel that.

I was ambivalent.  I wanted to teach, but I wanted to teach because I felt I needed to be a teacher to be an ally and an advocate for students like me, poor, female, and of color.  I wondered if I was being too sensitive about my student teaching experience.  Maybe I was projecting.

Ultimately, I don't think so.  I don't think I was imagining the unwillingness to talk about the reality of teacher bias or the dynamics of race in schools in seminar either.  I picked my focus districts purposefully.  I wanted to live and work in a district where the demographics of the student body demands a different approach, where the progress and positivity narrative had to be applied to students of color if only because there were no other options.

I guess you can tell practicum was pretty harrowing.

I brought all of that up to say this . . . . I didn't feel what I thought I would feel sitting in seminar with my classmates.

I feel it whenever I approach the city for a job interview, when I'm sitting in the car in the parking lot, when I'm forcing myself to breathe in the office.  I mentioned before that I have very little experience with wanting anything this much.  That sick feeling in the belly, the butterflies, the anxious excitement. . . . totally make it all worth it.