Subject Matter: Teaching As a Career Choice

Teachers are faced with different things, situations and problems all the time. And how they deal with them is always a learning experience. They don't stop learning when they graduate from college and receive their diploma and got licensed to teach.

It's not a spoiler alert. It's a fact.

They continue to learn a whole new lesson each time they teach their students. And each lesson is a learning experience that they add to their own life's invisible lesson plan that they need to survive as human beings.

 

I swear I didn't want to be a teacher. I didn't go to college to be a teacher. But fate led me there. Fate brought me to the door of the classroom. And that fate gave me happiness that I would have not known if I stayed in the corporate world.

Each day in the classroom is a challenge. Each day is a struggle both for me and my students. The challenges are endless and getting harder and harder with each lesson we tackle. But with each lesson we teach our students, no matter how hard we work to make a great impact on them, will only make sense if our students choose to take them. We can only do so much. It is up to them to take it or... leave it.

Being an optimistic as I am, I know that reality is a path that my students have to travel to - from home to school... and back.

Their reality could be a place that they found both in school or at home or neither. It could also be possible that "reality" is in the heart of our students. Or their reality is also a pretend one. And for some of them, they may not give us the chance to look at it for fear of being "judged".

Sad but true.

On my first day in the classroom as an Educational Technician here in the U.S. after I resigned from my 11 years of teaching High School in the Philippine Public School, I found myself in the middle of Mrs. R's Kindergarten class supporting a student who needs help with toileting. It was a totally different setup from what I was accustomed to; for one, it was totally a 360 shift from 15 years old almost adult kiddos to 5 years old kids.

Who knows what shy K was thinking when he said that - "he wanted to be a robber" when it was his turn to share what he wants to be when he grows up?

Who knows if he is eating 3 square meals a day?

Who knows if he is sleeping in a warm bed at night?

Who knows if he has clean clothes and dry shoes to wear to school?

Who knows? As a teacher, we cannot turn a blind eye on situations involving our students, especially when deep in our hearts we know that there is something wrong with them and that they need help. It is in our DNA to worry and look for solutions to the problems concerning our students. And sadly, we have our own limitations!

Fast forward to 2019, I am back teaching. But a different kind of teaching.

I am teaching not kindergarten kids or high schools kid... but kids-at-heart who already went from pre-K all the way to HS or college or even got their master's.

I am now teaching a new batch of students who needs help not with reading or writing or math but help with feeling better with their body and teaching them how to breathe.

My Yoga Students in one of the Yoga Classes I taught after school hour. 

These students are my colleagues who are making good and healthy choices because they know the importance of fitness and health in their lives.

Yes, I am a hesitant Yoga Teacher, who learned first from my personal experience the benefits of exercise to my own growth. I have 2 more months of classes and soon I will be certified as a Yoga Teacher. And from then on, the only thing I know is that I will still be teaching. I will be teaching the young students assigned to me in the classroom, in the playground, and in the lunchroom. And I will be teaching not-so-young students in their mats too.

I will still be teaching because I am a teacher. Teachers never get tired of teaching. Well, maybe we do and we whine about it a lot of times and a lot of times we still do it because we just love doing it.

As teachers, we can only do so much. Our limitations as educators and as human beings can sometimes hold us back to do the best we could to mold our future generation. 
- Ruthi Orona-Gregoire

To read more about her Teaching-Learning Experience... Click HERE.

-----------A Teacher on Time-Out------------

GOOD teachers have lessons plans.

BAD AWESOME teachers have blogs!

Ruthilicious - the teacher who is forever a student. 

She blogs when she is NOT Facebooking doing chores.

She blogs while she is ALSO Facebooking doing chores.

To read more about SUBJECT MATTERS... Click HERE.