You could use my childhood as a case study. I was not an easy child to work with. My mother often jokes that I hit the “terrible-twos” and failed to grow out of it until I was twenty. If it were not for my incredibly patient parents, I would have landed on the school-to-prison pipeline early in life.
I spend …show more content…
I discovered my desire to work with children when I started working with the Scouts, YMCA, and a youth treatment center.
I knew that I wanted to become a teacher one day while working at the YMCA. I had a coworker ask me, “Josh, what is your secret.” She would go on to ask how I was able to keep several of the older, more rambunctious children on task and out of trouble. At the time, I did not know the answer, and just thought it was some sort of innate gift. I would learn the answer to her question a few years later. During a professional development seminar for working with troubled youth, I discovered a foundational tenant of youth care that I had somehow picked up years prior. “If you want a child to be well behaved, you have to make them feel safe and to feel in control.” This cascaded into a period of reflection of the very few teachers I had growing up that whose classes I enjoyed. All of them shared the same theme. I always felt safe and welcome in their class. I decided then that education was probably the path for me. The reason I want to be a teacher is that I see the same traits in myself that made me love the classrooms of the very few teachers whose classrooms I