Born To Do This Shit [On Personal Legends and Teaching]
After a quick pause, I said, “You may begin.”
As the students got to work on this section of the test, I began to reflect on my life as a teacher, and came to realize that, yes, I was born to be in a classroom, teaching.
The set of students in front of me, a gathering of opted-out English Language Learners from different classes including mine, had different experiences coming into that exam, yet already had an engrained respect for me before I even said my first words of the day. They might have seen me pass by in the hallway, covering a class, or heard rumors about me from different kids. They knew I didn’t laugh, at least not in front of them. They knew I cracked some jokes, and rarely wrote up students, preferring to talk them out of their unwise decisions.
They heard I love teaching students, and they can see it in my eyes.
A few years ago, I didn’t know how my body language (or my actual language) manifested in them thinking I