Premise to Practice

9.04.11 By Sinta Cebrian

As children, we are often asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  However, as childhood transitions into adolescence and then turns into young adulthood, we slowly, but appropriately, shrug off youthful aspirations and dreams for better tailored goals and realistic futures.  At four years old, I proclaimed that I wanted to be the world’s greatest violinist.  By twelve, music was replaced with dreams of NASA.  After my brother’s death at fifteen, poetry and writing seemed to provide the solace needed for survival.  As twenty arrived, education clearly and simply made sense.  Now, at twenty-two, I want to be and am becoming a teacher.  In a close but unknown future, it will be my turn to ask the next generation of students, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  In return for sharing their inevitably ever-changing dreams, I will be one person in their educational journey to help them to discover who and what they want to be.

My role as a teacher is political because I have an agenda to promote, prepare, and support students to become agents of change within their own lives, schools, and communities.  I want my students to become critical thinkers, questioners, and problem-solvers who are continually evolving as life-long learners.  I believe that parents, generations, communities, and social and political institutions of diverse backgrounds must come together, collaborate, and engage in constructive dialogue in order for all of our children to gain access to and experience opportunities that can further their livelihoods and happiness.  Regardless of class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and circumstance, every child deserves access, opportunity, and continuous support for an education that can ultimately prepare them for a life of his or her choice.

Although my beliefs are based upon my own experiences, education, and social location, they are situated within a theoretical approach to education. In reality, I do not know how to fully transform these ideas into actions, practices, and methods of teaching yet. Like my fellow cohort members, I am in the process of learning of how to become an educator. In a few short days, school will start and I will be immersed in reality rather than the comfort of theory. I am excited. Apprehensive. Hopeful. Vulnerable. Unsure of my readiness… I am in transition from thinking about teaching in the abstract to experiencing it firsthand.

On the last day of summer classes, there was beautiful moment in which teaching suddenly became very real for me. As my roommate and I strolled down the main road toward our apartment, our conversation faded away as we noticed a young boy and man playing in the front doorway of the neighborhood barbershop. The boy, who looked no more than six or seven, filled the silence between my roommate and me with laughter as he strategically attempted to wrap his arms around the waist of his older friend. In that small moment as we walked by, I felt our four lives profoundly connect due to one powerful statement. Echoing the history and struggle of the civil rights movement through the language of Martin Luther King, Jr., the young man proudly declared into the street, “I have a dream living through you that one day you will go to college.”  The weight of the young man’s words has not left me since that afternoon. His hope continues to linger in my thoughts and has sparked a sense of urgency and purpose into my residency. As I begin to blend theory with practice, I hope to learn and develop the necessary skills to help this dream and other dreams become a reality for all my students.