Reflective Essay: Working In The Social Services Field

After years of working in the Social Services field, I felt that my heart needed a hiatus from the gut wrenching circumstances in which many of the families I assisted found themselves in. I could no longer bear the responsibility of a child’s life in my hands due to the bureaucracy and conditions that plagued many of the people in my caseload. The stress of such an endeavor was affecting my health. I still wanted to be helpful and to try to make a difference in peoples’ lives but not at the expense of my own.
I took some time off to reflect on what my next step would be and to be more available to my youngest child whom was entering the third grade at a different school. That school is the birth place of my interest in teaching. With new found time on my hands, I volunteered at the school on a daily basis. I did it all, from clearing trays in the cafeteria during lunch duty, assisting students with decoding and phonics to putting books back on the shelf in the library. I found the atmosphere in the school comforting, the teachers committed to their craft and the parents welcomed by administrators and the like to assist in any way possible. I went home every day exhausted but renewed by the notion that I had helped a child with a tricky math problem or …show more content…
Teaching came quite naturally to me. I do not wish to imply that teaching is easy, I have much to learn and an intense desire to do so. Nevertheless it would appear that I was inclined to be in this profession. It enabled me to make a difference via a different medium. At its core teaching is about engaging the mind; it is about helping students make meaningful relationships between subject matter and their environment. It is about finding new ways to approach the work so that students and parents feel empowered by their abilities and hopeful that what is lacking will surely be