I read a poem, given to my husband for Father’s Day by my daughter’s daycare. It was written from the voice of a child speaking to her father – telling him that he is everything she wants to be when she grows up.
My parents were divorced long before I could understand what it meant for Mom and Dad to be a strong and cohesive unit. My life was between their households – single mom on one side, dad and stepmom on the other. The consistency came, not from family dinners, but from their united focus on education and the strong work ethic of their combined Hispanic heritage: my father, first generation Mexican-American, and my mother, naturalized citizen from Colombia, South America.
During junior high and high school, I would tutor – mini classroom sessions – my fellow classmates, even my own mother, on the various topics being taught to me. Often it was math that the other students did not understand, and often it was math that I was tutoring others in. I was quite the little math teacher – just like my father.
He recently retired, my father, after having been a math teacher his whole life, over forty-five years. I would sit with him, at the kitchen table, during my court-appointed weekends with him, and grade homework, tests, and quizzes. It was a thrill, learning to grade and administrate classroom work from him every other weekend, then have my mother and friends be my guinea pigs while I stumbled through trying to teach them. Teaching drives me. That look of understanding that blossoms on someone’s face is a drug that I try to hit on as often as often as possible, regardless of the subject at hand.
A handful of years ago, I joined a women’s flat track roller derby league. It’s a motley crew of women, nurses and teachers and office professionals. Each time we hold a recruitment drive, and there are new girls to train, to teach, to skate with, I’m the first to volunteer – nay, to beg – to work with them. And the same skills I use with them, that warm and easy going nature, unafraid of the spills of a full-contact sport, I bring with me now, during my Supplemental Instruction Sessions with the University of Texas – Pan American for Mr. Rivera’s Intermediate Algebra class.
All of this, all of my childhood spent helping my father grade papers, holding pseudo classes for my friends and family, training new skaters in a beloved sport, and the work I’m doing now at the University are all combining to prepare me for my ultimate goal, that of being an educator. An educator, not just of my chosen field of mathematics, but a true role-model as only an Educator can be. A person that inspires, not just excitement and fascination with a given subject, but a person that helps you look down into yourself, find the good that is there, and makes you feel that not only are you capable but you are destined to succeed. I want to be that person, for all the students whose lives I will touch.
