BlakeTell2

While growing up, I always possessed a passion for not only learning, but teaching as well. I was "that kid" who loved being in school and couldn't wait to go back every day. When we got bored, My brother and I would play school at home and I would always be the teacher even though he is two years older than me and smarter. I had an appreciation for all my teachers and I looked up to each one of them. It wasn't until 7th grade that I knew for certain I wanted to be a teacher and I would do anything to become one. Seventh grade was one of my favorite school years because I felt like I was on some reality TV show. There was always so much drama everywhere since everyone was going through puberty and such. I had a group of friends that consisted of me and four other girls. We did everything together and everyone knew we were best friends. About three fourths of the way through the school year, one of the girls in our group started to become really annoying and mean. She would lie about everything and we would always catch her in her lies and then when we would ask her why she lied she was always really rude to us. The four of us decided that we didn't want to be friends with her anymore, so we stopped hanging out and talking to her. One day our teachers held the four of us after class to say that she's noticed we don't hang around our old friend anymore and she was wondering what was going on. We told her the story and she talked us through how to go about becoming her friend again. It was at this moment that I realized, being a teacher doesn't mean you just stand in front of a class and lecture to them; it's deeper than that. A teacher forms a bond with their students and becomes their parents outside of home. My teacher could have just ignored our problem back then, but she chose to get involved and help us out and she reformed the friendship we would have lost. This is when I realized how much opportunity there is to help people out as a teacher and I knew one day, I wanted to be just like my teacher.
 * __Past__**

Since I want t become a teacher, I do a lot of tutoring and babysitting right now. My mom works at a preschool and I would go there over the summer on random days and help her teach the kids their basic skills. For four years I was a Hebrew school teacher at my Temple and I loved it. Currently I babysit kids and help them with their homework since their parents are foreign and speak broken English. I am also always willing to help my friends out when the are struggling in a class I am doing well in. One recent moment that reassured me of my life choices was when I helped my friend study for math. In our statistics class, we are assigned online homework and quizzes. I am very good at math so I always get above a 90% on every assignment. My friend was having a hard time understanding the lesson and asked me if I could help him take the online quiz. He told me that he got in the 50's on our last test and gets in the 80's on pretty much every assignment. While helping him take the quiz I noticed how happy he was that he was getting the answers right, but I also noticed he was taking the quiz while looking up everything in his notes. I asked him whether he actually knew how to do the problems or if he was just basing it off the examples in the notes. He said that he was just looking at the notes and didn't actually know how to solve the problems on his own. I took this opportunity to teach him how to actually do the problems without looking at his notes and he began to understand the material. I could see the excitement on his face when he actually knew what to do to get the answers to the problems and could get the right answers without any help. When he finished the quiz it showed him the grade of 95% and he only got points off because he rounded a number incorrectly. He started freaking out because that was the first time he did well on one of the assignments. He was so happy which made me feel great that I was able to teach him the material and make him do well. This experience reassured me that for the rest of my life I want to see that look on peoples faces and I hope to do so as a teacher.
 * __Present__**

__**Future**__ It's really hard for me to think of my future because I don't like to set expectations for my future life; I just take it as it comes. However, I hope that one day I will achieve my lifelong dream of becoming a teacher. To me all the hard work will pay off when I see the joy in my students faces. My goal as a teacher is not only to have them understand the class materials, but to become engaged and interested in learning it as well. It will all be worth it to me just to see a students face light up when something clicks for them and they finally understand the material. Or maybe, like my seventh grade teacher, I will help my students out with personal problems they trust to let me in on. I hope to care for my students as if they were my own children because outside of their home, I take on responsibility for them. I hope to be able to make a difference in many children's' lives and do what I love which is to help other people and make them happy.