Who Is The Biggest Factor In My Decision To Be A Teacher

Possibly the biggest factor in my decision to be a teacher was my fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Shaw. He was my teacher at such a critical point in my life. I was 11 years old learning how the world worked and trying to discover who I was. Mr. Shaw quickly became a mentor for all twenty-nine of us in the class and didn’t just teach us math or science but life lessons. I still can imagine his loud voice coming from the back of the classroom as he taught us to be successful in life or how words can affect people in both positive and negative ways. He believed in every single one of us and told us that often when a student was struggling with an assignment. When I told him that aspired to be a teacher he looked me straight in the eyes and he smiled. He said, “You would make a very good teacher.” For an eleven-year-old, that did numbers to my self-esteem. To be told from someone I admired and looked up to that I would make a great teacher made me confident that I was going to be a teacher and I was going to be just like Mr. Shaw. …show more content…
Shaw, though. In eighth grade, I had a teacher who laughed at me when I told him I wanted to be a teacher. He said to me, “A teacher? You want to spend the rest of your life around other people’s kids?” I replied yes. “It’s a waste of your time. Someone with your academic success could do much better things than teach. You could make more money than that.” I was upset. It didn’t seem like a waste a time to me. It was something I could see myself enjoying and I knew that I could make a difference. However, because of that teacher, for the rest of my eighth-grade year, I replied with, “I don’t know,” whenever someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew