“My journey as a teacher came out of necessity at first (…) I was in college, majoring in Professional Writing because I wanted to become a journalist. My sophomore year, 9/11 happened and journalism (…) became a little dangerous. If you wanted to be an objective journalist—if you wanted to question things—people were getting fired. My faculty advisor and some of my professors (…) were like, ‘You might want to rethink this.’ So I thought, ‘Oh, my God! What am I going to do now? I don't want to be this type of journalist. I don't want to do this type of writing!’ So I was kind of lost.”
“I said, ‘Well, maybe I'll just major in English and get my Master's degree.’ And with that came an opportunity to be an adjunct professor teaching English Composition to sophomores that were about to fail out because they weren't passing the (…) writing test. I just took it because they said, ‘You know, if you do that we'll help pay for your Master's degree.’”
“So I started adjuncting and kind of liked it. It was kind of unexpected.”
“I loved it. I started to really love that feeling of, ‘Oh, wow! I'm not just teaching writing, I'm actually doing something else here.’ I didn't quite know what that was at the time, but I'm like, ‘There's something else happening here that I really like, other than the syllabus and reading books and writing’—which I loved also. It was just something about the awakening of people and being a part of that that I loved.”
“And then my professors (…) a few of them were like, ‘You know, you're really good at this—You're a natural.’ Of course who doesn't like to hear that they're good at something, right? And then feeling it.”
“So I said, ‘You know, I want to do this. I want to keep doing this, but I can't’ (…) I had friends that were adjuncting in four different colleges just to make ends meet and I said, ‘Well, that's not for me.’ And then by happenstance I got together with a friend of mine who was in the Teaching Fellows program (…) And I'm like, ‘Oh, my God! Maybe this is something that I can get into.’”