PORTFOLIO: My Story

  My Story

If someone ever told me that I would become a teacher, I would vehemently deny it. Just like every child, while growing up, I had a clear picture of the type of profession I wanted to have in the future. It was either an international lawyer or an international journalist. When I wanted to enroll in the university, my first choice was Law, and the second one was Journalism and Mass Communication.  I got my first choice. I felt that these professions influenced decisions across the world: the media exposes situations, and lawyers came up with proposals, initiated law reforms, and defended and influenced the decisions taken in relation to the law. This was how I saw the world, at my very tender age. For me, the teaching profession was limited only to the four walls of the classroom. But I wanted to be at the forefront and to be seen, to be a voice in this world, and teaching was too limiting for my great ambitions. But I was mistaken.

As I grew in maturity, I realized in fact that education was the only profession that truly gave me the opportunity to influence the world, and to do so by influencing the attitudes and molding the character of the students under my care. I eventually understood that everybody in all the other professions could also be also a teacher in the specific domain in which (s)he was evolving, because with his or her knowledge and years of experience, (s)he could effectively and efficiently teach others how to do things.

I experienced my very first encounter with teaching when I was a first-year university student. I was assisting younger students from secondary school with their homework, and I could make them understand their lessons. Some years later after my graduation, I embraced the teaching profession, with the conviction that it was the only profession that influenced all other professions. I felt that through teaching, I could duplicate myself into my students and inculcate in them some real-life human values that I believed in, and make them become better persons in the future. That’s it! Teachers are in the privileged position of influencing the future through what they build in their students. The four small walls of the classroom became to me the nursery where teachers planted and nursed the seed of greatness in their students, who would one day go out there to the world and make great things happen. And this is what I consider to be the greatest reward, beyond all that money can buy. However, in order to be able to help empower the students for this greatness to occur, I must be a great teacher, upholding the right values that genuinely build up societies and make the whole world meaningful, and a place worth living. 

With my formal training as a teacher in this Graduate Program in Teaching English to Young Learners, it has now dawned on me that far from aspiring to be seen at the forefront,  I must be that screenwriter who works hidden the backstage and who makes a sacrifice for the sake of the students, who are to perform on stage and be acclaimed by the whole world for their prowess. Their success will be my success.  I would be proud to know that I contributed somehow somewhere to their victory.