What made me decide to uproot my life in Denver, Colorado to move across the Atlantic Ocean to live and teach in Morocco for two years? If you’ve read this far, maybe you are a teacher interested in moving abroad as well, maybe just another human hoping to connect through the power of story.
Maybe if I write this blog it will also help me understand my own journey as a teacher and, ultimately, as a human. Today, I choose to believe in the maybes.
In order to understand my choice and the reasons behind it we need to rewind, turn back a few pages to a year ago, when I was no longer sure if I even wanted to be a teacher anymore. This period of teaching and in my life was distinctly dark, and worthy of it’s own entire post so I’ll just gently skim over it here. It was time for mid year conversations about my performance with my coach, my evaluator, my amazing Assistant Principal and my friend. This conversation was a major turning point.
Brene Brown describes in her Netflix Special: A Call Courage one of the defining characteristic of effective leaders. She says, “brave leaders are never silent around hard things.” When I look at the page in my life, the words from my coach “I’m not sure if being a public school teacher is the career for you,” still hurt my pride but resonate with my turmoil in my soul. At the time I was, in fact , depressed, suffering from second hand trauma and was quite frankly, a broken teacher. I share this part of my journey through a lens of gratitude because I really did need someone to shake me awake, to realize how my passion for teaching had turned into a routine of suffering and survival.
“Brave leaders are never silent about hard things”
Brene Brown, A Call to Courage
This is the part where I add the disclaimer that this is only my own experience, my perspective on events in a uniquely impacted Title I school. My therapist and my coach guided me to opportunities I never realized existed. The point I hope to come across in this introduction is that I was in such deep pain, wallowing in my own pity that I didn’t realize I was drowning on my own Titanic. Instead, I allowed it dragged me under until someone threw me a life jacket.
This next chapter of my life can be called, “Woods learns how to carve her own life boat.” I have now left the U.S. S. Public Education and am, both literally and metaphorically, paddling across the ocean. My epiphany that the choices I made did, in fact, determine the direction of my life, made me pick up my own oar, put it in the water and finally began to steer towards clearer waters. As my sister says, “steering your life and the direction you want to go one stroke at a time.” I would still be at the bottom of the ocean without the courageous people in my life; my coach, my therapist, my sister, my family, my co-teachers.
I finally feel as if I can see the beauty in each moment again. I no longer wonder if I want to teach, if I feel happy, I feel confident in myself and my choices again. If you are a teacher, or anyone inhabiting planet earth looking for their oar, I hope this provides something, anything on the journey down your own river.
I have been on the Titanic of American public education with some of the most amazing humans imaginable. Time has made me realize that the best educators were also humans who chose to build their own lifeboats. There is no amount of gratitude that I can ever express to those who I worked alongside, that paddled and struggled with me, that showed me what effective teaching can be. To those incredible educators in public, private or any other entity of education, I salute and stand with you.
Woods Wanders the World 