There's always been something in me that has known that I wanted to teach. When I was little, I assumed that because my mother was a teacher and my father was a carpenter, I would be one of those two things when I grew up. Then, when I realized I could be anything I wanted to be, I started to get a little more creative. For a while I wanted to own a zoo. There was a time when I wanted to be a crossing guard, and at one point I was seriously considering becoming an interior decorator. I put the thought of teaching out of my mind, and by the time I arrived at college I had decided to major in public relations. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I enjoyed being able to tell people definitively what I was going to do with myself when I got out of college. I thought I had it all figured out. Then, during semester break of my freshman year, I realized what I really wanted to do with my life. I realized that I really wanted to teach.

I was home for break a few weeks before the school where my mother teaches went on vacation. Since I was the first of my group of friends to get home, and I didn't have any other plans during the days, I decided to go back to school with my mom for a while. Although I hadn't gone to elementary school in the town where she works, I had visited her classroom many times when I was younger, and I had always enjoyed being there. I figured it would be fun to go and hang out in her classroom for a while again, talk to some of her kids, and let them finally meet the daughter she always told them about. I had been expecting to have a good time, but I hadn't realized just how much fun it was going to be to go back to fifth grade.

When I stepped back into room 15 of Squantum Elementary School, where I had spent so many afternoons when I was younger, something clicked. All of a sudden, I was surrounded by twenty-some 10- and 11-year-olds who wanted to talk to me. They were interested by the fact that I was in college in Washington, DC, they were entertained by the way that my mother and I made fun of each other in the middle of her lessons, and they were intrigued by the fact that my fifth grade teacher had written one of the books that they were using in their class. But most of all, they were fascinated by the fact that I was fascinated by them.

Over the course of the few days that I was in their class, I got to know most of my mother's students by name. I heard stories about how the local youth hockey team was going to play in a tournament in Canada, and I took out a map to help them figure out which route they were most likely to take when one of them asked me how long it would take to drive there. In an attempt to brighten the spirits of one of their classmates who was undergoing chemotherapy, I helped the class make a giant paper chain, the length of which we estimated and then measured and later delivered to his house. At the point when my conversation with a small group of students about the quality of the crayons that the school provided turned into a short lesson in geometry, I realized just how much sense it made for me to become a teacher. As I was sitting there with those four students, talking about circles, compasses, protractors, perpendicular bisectors, midpoints, rectangles, and triangles, I realized that I couldn't think of anything else that I would rather do with the rest of my life. At that moment, I recognized the career that was going to make me happier than any other career would. And at that point, I decided I was going to go back to my plan from when I was three - I was going to be a teacher, just like my mom.