For this past week’s #walkmyworld, I spent a long time thinking about various possibilities and events for sharing. I’ve been many different people over the course of becoming the professor I am today, but I’ve thought of myself as a teacher for many years. My first teaching gig was as a teenager, when I taught horseback riding. When I abandoned my original graduate school plans to study education policy — by writing an undergrad thesis, I had learned exactly how much I disliked reading and writing that kind of research — I went with something that felt plausible, comfortable, familiar. I decided to become an English teacher.

It sounds too easy when I tell the story like that, though.

One thing I’ve found is that there’s very few people have easy, straightforward career stories. In the midst of this unrelenting winter, my methods students have been interviewing for their full-year certification internships. As they jump into planning their own careers as teachers, I can see the tension rising. They’re seniors, soon to be graduate students, and they want to know that their plans will resolve into solidity, too, eventually. So, I’ve been trying to talk through my own life more often. It’s complicated, even in hindsight, and I have to laugh at myself.Read More »