Rae La Soul

I finished my first week of teaching. It’s been the first time in two years that I’ve been able to get back into the classroom. I cannot begin to express how much I’ve missed this aspect of my life. When I changed jobs last year, I underestimated the amount of flexibility that I would lose that would allow me to continue with my other passions. As a result, my mood changed frequently and drastically. I was always exhausted and I really felt like I wasn’t really accomplishing much (although I was accomplishing a lot for my job). Nevertheless, I’m happy to be back in the swing of things.

This summer, I’m teaching high school students how to master the basics of Excel. Now while I use it on the back-end with Visual Basic programming, I don’t get to dive that deeply into it with this session. Based on my assessment, four weeks isn’t enough time to do all of that anyway. This is because majority of my students have never used Excel before. It still shocks me to know that some students have not even heard or used business applications until they come to me. This inspires me to work even harder to expose them to as much as I can in a way that they will retain it and apply it in the future.

I think that’s one of the things I’m most grateful about: meeting so many different individuals with different personalities and different perspectives. For one, it definitely teaches you how to think more critically. This is mainly because people interpret things in their own manners based on their level of understanding. In turn, as a good educator, you need to adopt different teaching styles to accommodate the various learning styles you encounter. This is something that has permeated in the positions I’ve held and hold currently in Corporate America. And I honestly believe it has been crucial to my success thus far.

I lingered around today after class ended and I thought about when I first started teaching. In the past, I’ve taught robotics courses, programming, business computer applications, algebra, and other seminars. I started as a graduate TA and I knew that was one of the assistantships that I wanted when I began grad school a few years ago. I knew it after I had my first experience assisting with classroom instruction my last semester in undergrad. And it stuck with me. The lifestyle. The purpose. The students. It all stuck with me.

And I thank God that I’ve been blessed with these experiences. And I thank God for the grace to embrace it all.