I’m reading Ron Clark’s The Essential 55 again. He is a teacher who is known for the amazing inroads he has made with underprivileged, undernourished, undereducated students in rural North Carolina.

I wake up some days and am still amazed that I’ve made the decision to teach. Me – the same girl who grew up swearing (that would be figuratively, not literally) that she would never teach. While I’ve always had a healthy respect for my dad’s career and have had some amazing teachers in my own life, I wanted something different.

Or thought I wanted something different.

This desire to teach is something that is more like a calling to me right now, I guess. It’s a part of that urgency that is burning in me. I think that maybe I am just now at the point in my life where I am ready to fill up young minds with exciting possibilities that can be theirs. That should be theirs.

There is just something so special about young minds – when the mind and the heart is so open to influence – that tugs at my heart. Makes me want to help channel all that energy into positive avenues. Creative avenues. Avenues that will leave them changed, that will make them thinkers for life.

I believe that writing can do that for a person. It is a way to work through issues, to create a world of your own, to reach out and touch someone, to leave your fingerprints all over this life by the words you pen…

I want to teach that.