ABSTRACT
In her poem, Tracy expresses the rush, confusion, exhilaration, challenges, and concerns that accompany becoming a teacher, a process perhaps more complex today than ever. Tracy, a new teacher at a suburban high school, focuses on the chief reason she chose to teach: her desire to work with young people. The opportunity to forge relationships with students is a key attraction of teaching. This field is all about working with people-young and old, students and administrators, colleagues and parents. Navigating the often intense personal landscape of teaching is, unavoidably, a highly personal process. Teachers bring their personalities, personal and familial histories, and certainly their own school histories to bear on the task of teaching every time they step into the classroom. Computers, numbers and recordkeeping, and paperwork also form an important part of their daily rituals, to be sure, but the fundamental project of teaching remains dealing with other people: learning how to motivate others, help them learn, offer useful feedback, and evaluate whether students have succeeded or failed in mastering subject matter. There’s simply no way to escape one’s autobiography in becoming a teacher and claiming responsibility for motivating others (and self) to succeed academically.
