3-Minute Story of How I Became an Educator - Guided By Questions

My friends and I in Taiwan.  I'm on the far right.

(Originally prepared for my leadership class at Harvard Graduate School of Education)

I have always been guided by questions, not answers.  The question the jumpstarted my career was a very noble one: How do I impress this one girl? 

In college, I dated a girl who grew up in South Korea; her parents were teachers at an international school.  She would always say that when she graduated she would become an overseas teacher, and I vowed to join her because I was, frankly, infatuated.  In essence, I became a teacher to impress her.  Long story short, we broke up, and she got engaged to another.  But I was still determined impress her, so I moved to Taiwan to become an ESL teacher.

Taiwan was my Damascus road experience.  It was the first time I was a minority, and that was a transformative experience.  I couldn’t read the signs on street corners, couldn’t read food menus in restaurants, and my skin color and culture were radically different from the people who surrounded me.   

It was in Taiwan that I was reminded of an important question my professor once asked me, “How would your life be different if you were a minority?”  I grew up in suburban, white, middle-class, evangelical Christian America, and my whole life was characteristically homogenous.  Even in college, I went to a nearly all white middle-class, evangelical, Christian university in Kentucky.  To say we lacked diversity would be a tragic understatement.  However, this one professor wanted to push me out of the box, into a world characterized by difference.

Determined to discover the answer to my professor’s question, I continued putting myself in situations where I was the minority.  I worked in an urban high school in Memphis, Tennessee and then in an urban middle school in a large city in North Carolina.  In both cities, most of my students were African-American and Latino, and most of my colleagues were not of the same race as I.  I was learning what it meant to be wholly different.  The outsider.

 When I think back on these two questions that have guided the past 8 years of my life, I’m perplexed because I didn’t answer either of them.  I never figured out how to impress that girl, and I never figured out what it truly meant to be a minority.  However, along the way I began to ask myself new questions about my life.  How did I end up marrying somehow as wonderful as Kendra?  Why do I love my dog so much?  How do I create a school where all kids can learn?  How do I make school feel a lot less like school?  In essence, what I learned is that questions guide me, not answers.  In fact, I rarely find the answers to my questions, but the questions I ask beget more questions.  And each successive question brings me a little bit closer to what I want to become.