Why do I want to be a teacher? Wouldn’t I rather do something to get my blood pumping? The writing has always felt right and natural, but am I truly good enough to find a career in that? With authors like Bradbury, Lee, Kaur, Paz and many others who dominated copious styles and shelves, what could I really do? My honesty is not relatable and my feeble attempts at relatability make me seem like a forty-year old man trying to connect to his teenage daughter.

                I mean can I really write books about the boy I loved when I was sixteen or all the boys who loved me for five minutes (or sometimes ten) for the next thirty years? Could I even do it for the next ten? How do authors become one it wonders? Who decided why not? Let’s make students compare birds to innocence and decide whether or not Hester was a victim.  Like why even teach if I can’t teach them something they’re not going to be passionate about? I want to look at a group of pupils and then decide what I want them to read, based on what they’d want to read. That is what is wrong with this education system. Even my small high school had the same curriculum for every freshman class in the span of five years. That is nearly 400 teenagers. Reading the exact same books, being treated as if their lives and cares and passions are exactly the same but they’re not and that needs to change and why even teach if I can’t change that?

                It seems to be that no matter who writes about education and adolescents: scientists, authors, philosophers, no one wants to listen. That is because schooling is not just a business. A business meant to break the hearts of educators in the sense that the teachers in today’s society do everything they can for their students. When I was in the third grade I never brushed my hair, I cried when someone raised their voice, I flinched when people touched me, I constantly compared myself to my older sister. My teacher took me to cut my hair. She also took me to a nice woman, who for the next six years listened to my issues, the issues I faced at home, the issues I faced when I looked in the mirror, or when I looked inside of myself. When I reached high school my peers were scared to tell their teachers about the troubles they faced at home. My friends told me it was because if the school felt you were unsafe they would call the crisis line and the people, who had the same qualifications as the nice woman I had known years prior but without the heart she had inside her chest. My peers were terrified of the people who would come and evaluate these teenagers and decide if their angst was dangerous and who decided that this fear was how they should run a school? How could I teach knowing that my students are terrified of what they’re facing and that they can’t come to me because they are scared of retaliation.