My Journey to Realizing My Purpose

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Stephanie?”

I would say I wanted to be a nurse or maybe even a doctor, knowing damn well that career path wasn’t for me. In fact, I didn’t know what I wanted to be at all. A lot of my ideas got shut down. I went from wanting to be a pilot to a wedding planner to wanting to do hair, and then my junior year of high school, I just settled for nursing.

No one really supported my ideas for my career path except for when I said I wanted to be a nurse.

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I guess it’s because it’s a safe job. Nurses are always in demand and they get paid pretty well. I always felt kind of left out because all of my relatives have gone to or planned to go to nursing school, medical school, or pursue other prestigious jobs, but science and math are not my thing — no matter how hard I tried.

When I started my first semester of college, I already had cold feet about being a nursing major. I was so in despair about not finding a career path that I wanted that I even thought about joining the armed forces.

Thank God, I changed my mind about that.

After taking my college level biology course, I figured that I needed to stop trying to do something that I don’t like or that I have trouble with just to get my family’s approval.

I always had a passion for history, especially Black history, which I read up on in my spare time since my predominantly White high school didn’t offer an African-American or African-diaspora history course.

So I decided I wanted to teach — as everybody says, “Kids are the future.” They need teachers. They need teachers who genuinely care about them and want to see them succeed. Throughout school I struggled. I had many teachers who watched me struggle to pass their classes, yet I recall only two offering me a helping hand. The rest acted as if it was not their problem if I passed or not. They’d make condescending statements like, “I went to school for this. I don’t see why you guys don’t understand this. It’s so easy.”

Those types of statements make students feel hopeless. It makes us feel as though we’re not smart enough. There are too many students that feel this way. There are too many that quit simply because they feel like their teachers could care less if they failed.

I want to be the teacher that brings learning back in to the education system. I want to be the teacher that all my students can feel comfortable talking to about what they’re struggling with. I’ll be the teacher that will stay after school as late as possible just to make sure you understand what’s going on in class. I don’t want students leaving my class feeling like the only skill they learned was how to take a standardized test. I want them to leave feeling like they learned something. I want them to leave feeling like they’ve accomplished something. I don’t care if I don’t make six figures a year…

I care about the children.

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