Reflections on A Semster

The following blog was written by Mr. Ethan Walsh, and English Teacher at Carson High School. Mr Walsh is currently in his first full-year of teaching.

August 24, 2015 was a landmark day for me.  I remember waking up and saying to myself, “I am a teacher.”  Even though I have taught in some capacity for years and I joined the Carson staff in the spring of 2015, there was just something about this day that overwhelmed me with emotion.  I reflected that what I had studied and worked for had been realized.  I recognized the responsibility on my shoulders to help shape the minds of my students.  I resolved to do no harm, to remember my training, and to reform how I and my students look at the world.

It hasn’t been easy.  It’s true what you hear about the first year of teaching.  I don’t give up.  What is easy is not often what is right.  That is the motto I live by and the reason I’m sticking to this.  So if I have anything to share today, it’s don’t give up and don’t let anyone else determine your destiny.  You may have noticed the alliteration at the end of my first paragraph (yes, I’m slipping some English into this).  When I was a child, I went to speech therapy because I could not pronounce R.  I failed the fifth grade state writing test.  Thank goodness that everything is on a computer now days because spell check saves me on a sentence by sentence basis.  Though I have never been diagnosed, I wonder whether I may have a slight form of dyslexia because I often mix up the middle letters of words when I am writing on the board.  I just have my students correct me and we move on.

Just because you are not good at something does not mean that you cannot be good at it.  Current limitations do not determine future possibilities.

So yeah, things go wrong.  Students break things and throw them across the room.  That lesson that you got up at three in the morning to prepare did not go so well.  You get some bad test scores.  All these things and more can be a little disappointing.  We just can’t let it be discouraging.  As my wise mission president said, “You can be disappointed, but don’t be discouraged.  Never let anything take away your courage.”

As we go into this new semester, let us remember that not everything goes right, and that’s okay.  Let us remember why we came into this.  I am grateful for the support, the opportunity to grow, and the home that I have received here at Carson.

I am a teacher.

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