My name is Brianna Wale. I grew up in Regina with my mom and little sister. My sister and I are super close and do almost everything together. She is twelve so I get a lot of practice teaching when I help her with homework or projects and I get to help her with the problems she faces, which gives me an insight into the kind of problems my students might be facing in the future.          

When I was younger I was in as many activities as I could fit in a week. I took tap and jazz dance, and baton twirling, was in soccer and girl guides. I was a safety patrol and band in grade 7, in my high school choir for four years, youth group and youth choir, and in many plays throughout school. I was part of the Encouragers and Catholic Youth Leadership team at my high school, which allowed me to work with youth in inner city schools.

We only live a few blocks from my grandparents, so my grandma was around quite a lot when I was growing up, and she still is. Her and my mom always taught me to be a good person and be there for everyone. They told me to be friendly to everyone, even if they were not nice to me or we were not friends. My Catholic Youth Leadership teacher in high school taught me the same things. This helped me to realize I really enjoying helping people, and want to spend my life helping people. This is the reason I want to be a teacher: mentoring.

I want to teach to help students who are struggling. Whether struggling with school or things outside the school like family or relationship problems, I want to be the teacher they can turn to for support. I know that many students who are struggling often feel like they have no one to turn to. I know because I was that student.

When I was in high school, I was a student who found that classes and learning were easy, but relationships and self-esteem were difficult. As a result, I was often struggling with personal things that prevented me from fully concentrating on lessons and restricted my learning. But there were a few teachers who were always there to listen and help me through whatever I was struggling with, from problems with my mom to boys to my friends. I wish to now be that teacher for other students. I want to be there to listen to them and give them advice when they need it, in hopes of making school easier and more enjoyable for them. This will help the students to not only learn the school lessons, but also how to be compassionate and empathetic to others like I am to them.

In my eyes, education is not supposed to be just learning parts of speech and calculus so they can move on to Universities, but rather helping students grow as people and learn skills to be successful in their futures. Many teachers feel that they have to teach what the curriculum says and make sure the students have all the facts and knowledge they are supposed to have. This is true, but it is not the only purpose of education. My mom and grandma always told me that getting good grades was important. I believe that is true for two reasons. First, it means you understand the material and now have the knowledge. Second, you worked hard enough to earn that grade, this reason being the most important. The REAL purpose of education is to give the students the skills to make it in the “real world” after they graduate. Skills like punctuality, hard work, organization, and empathy and compassion.

The foreword of the Kimashiro text makes the point that teachers need to work against the status quo, and I believe this is true. Many teachers simply teach the curriculum content and nothing more. Students need more out of their education then just learning how to analyze a text or solve for x, and that’s what traditional education does. I think teachers need to teach their students the things they need for life.

Learning these skills can be difficult for some students, as can learning the subject matter. The reasons for this could be numerous, from the students not being able to focus to having a learning problem or disability to everything in between. I feel the best way for people to learn is to eliminate as many of these as they can. Teachers can help students to focus by making lessons engaging and ensuring that their students do not have personal problems distracting them. They can also offer extra attention and assistance to students both during class and outside of class time. This is extra time and effort for the teachers, but if they truly love it and care about their students, they will find it rewarding.

That is something else my mom and grandma taught me – do what you love and do it well. Whether that is dancing, writing, photography (all of which I am incredibly passionate about) or any other thing, do it to the best of your abilities. I have applied this aspect to all parts of my life so far and will continue to my whole life. If I love to teach, I will do the best I can at it, and my students will hopefully notice and put their best into both school classes and their passions.

 

These reasons are why I chose to become a teacher. There are many good teachers out there who exemplify these traits every day. But there are also some who do not, and I want to add to the list of those who do. I want to be one of those teachers that parents are proud taught their children. The old saying “those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach” is incredibly inaccurate and I want to people to see how wonderful teachers can be and how beneficial they can be to their student’s lives, both in school and outside it.

Most of the beliefs and values I have in my life are ones I wish my students would have as well. And my beliefs and values were instilled in me by my mom and my grandma. I grew up with just my mom and my younger sister, and my grandma was always around. The three of them are the reasons behind a lot of the decisions I make. The beliefs and values they gave me are what helps drive my desire to be a teacher. The values and lessons they gave me are ones that all people could benefit from knowing and I hope to be able to instill these values in my students one day.

Curriculum as Lived: How Places Shape Our Lives

The first assignment we were asked to complete was an autobiography detailing where we came from and what made us want to teach.

Curriculum as Negotiated: How Stories Shape Our Lives

The second assignment was a reflection on a group of stories we read. We had to choose one story and go into detail about it. What connections we made to it, how it made us feel. An in depth analysis.

This story, “Framing the Family Tree” by Sudie Hofmann really struck me. I was that child who had no dad to make things for on Father’s Day and who only had half a family tree. I never noticed when I was in school, but reading this made me realize that many teachers are not very sensitive or attentive of the fact that some students were in that situation and how often those types of assignments or projects are given.

I had one of those assignments in probably every grade from kindergarten to twelfth. But I never really thought anything of it. I just resigned to choosing my grandpa for the Father’s Day gift crafts and went on with completing it. But because of this, I know firsthand that these types of assignment can affect the way students view their classroom “spaces.” Many students can feel left out because they do not have one parent, or in some cases both parents. And feeling like they do not belong can affect how safe they feel in their classroom and in turn, how well they do in school.

Although I had resigned to the fact of not having a father at an early age and learned to cater Father’s Day to my Grandpa, I still felt the occasional pang of discomfort, much like the narrator and her young daughter. I have had classmates ask why I wrote an acrostic poem for “GRANDPA” rather than for “DAD” or why I never brought my dad to any school functions. And if there was class time given to work on these father projects, I often sat by myself and worked on it, sometimes hiding them from other students.

Even though I sometimes felt out of place, I had my mom who did a better job by herself then some families with two parents (not to be rude toward two parent families). And I had my grandma. Like the story “Heather’s Moms Got Married,” I had two moms, but not in the same sense as the story. I had my mother and my grandmother, who supported me just as well as a mother and father would have.

But until I read that story, I never realized how much teachers overlook those situations. Almost every teacher I had assigned some type of family tree or Father’s Day assignment, and telling a student to choose another person who is a close approximation, as I did with my grandfather, was often seen as the answer to the problem, but it is not. Teachers should allow these types of situations to be expressed in what they assign, and they should take into account how these affect a student’s view of place and space.

If a student feels isolated from a peer discussion about their fathers, or has to have a different assignment than other students, they can feel they are different and can often feel ostracized and unsafe in the classroom. Looking back to the ideas of spaces and places, safety and feeling secure in a place such as a classroom is vital to student learning. And when assigning things that make students realize they are different, it can eliminate the safe feelings and lead to discomfort and poor performance.

This story, as well as the one about the LGBTQ parents, helped me to realize that things are not as black and white as they often appear. Teachers make assumptions that all students will be able to complete the assignments they give, when in reality, that may be far from the truth. Reading about the little girl who made the tie for her dad was very hard for me, because I know that little girl’s feelings. Our father’s are absent for different reasons, but the feelings are the same.

I managed to use my experiences from school to learn how to or how not to teach my students, but many students are not that lucky. Teachers need to be conscious of the varying situations their students may be facing and adjust their lessons and assignments accordingly, unlike the teacher in the story, and many teachers I had.