Day 12

I am like most people in that I am inspired by others. I try to surround myself with people whom I admire and yearn to mirror more. This is where my journey led me today.

One of the best parts about teaching is how much you can learn from your students. Kids can be far more grounded and insightful than they may even know. I suppose it is something about their youth that keeps them more pure in character than others. Now when I say this, I do so with the burning image of peer pressure cruelties glowing bright in my mind. The way that teenagers behave is not wholly true to their character; they don't typically know this either. But every once in awhile you get a student that surprises you by having the ability to teach you AND does so with such poise and grace.

Last year while spending my days lecturing about the importance of cells and their organelles, demonstrating how divergent plate boundaries make mountains, and attempting to prove that there really is nothing other than biology in this world... I found myself intinctively reaching those kids on a more humanistic level. I learned about many of their lives outside of the school walls and made many efforts to be a good mentor to them.

One student, in particular, came to me on a number of occasions-- mostly to escape the drama of being a teenager-- to have lunch with and share thoughts of the world. We would talk about interesting animals, different visual art mediums, cherished books, and the world as we knew it. She is, by a long shot, one of the most mature and global-thinking teens I have ever had the privilege of teaching. Throughout our talks, she came to reveal that she had written and submitted an essay that she wrote on her beliefs.

If you have never heard of it, "This I Believe" is a fairly famed compilation of essays composed by authors of celebrity status all the way down to the local janitors at the supermarket. The website is based off of a radio program that aired in the 50s depicting stories of unique lives all over the country.

In much honor of my courageous and inspirational student, I chose today to write my own "This I Believe" essay. The terms for writing explain that it needs to simply be along the lines of something that you strongly believe in. Easy enough. Without really knowing for certain what that would be I began to write. I figured that something that I truly believed in would just simply come out on paper. And that it did.

I believe in myself.