When I grow up I want to be....

I just borrowed this post idea from KTB. I must apologise for it's theft, but I was inspired to write something in response to her post (which dissed my profession, might I add). Just in case you see this KTB - I do forgive you, mostly because I DO know a lot of whiny teachers who HAVE never lived in the real world.

As for me...well, I almost always wanted to be a nurse or a teacher as a child. I had some deep and idealistic desire to guide and help people, I suppose. However, I did - at one point - have a short-lived but very bizarre ambition to be a nun. In all fairness, I had just seen 'The Sound of Music', which remains to this day one of my favourite movies. And so it was that I announced grandly and very importantly to my Grandmother that I was going to become a nun. Naturally, this was a bit of a shock to her, as we have never been a family of churchgoers. To compound this, our family isn't actually Catholic - but I wasn't aware of religious differences as a child, and certainly didn't know we weren't the 'right religion' to be a nun.

Rather unexplicably, instead of choosing to tell me this, my Gran decided to inform me that all nuns had to take a VOW OF SILENCE. Being the verbose and perpetually noisy, excitable child that I was, I decided that a life of silence would not be too much fun for me. It also, quite conveniently, explained why Maria hated her life in the convent so much - of course, she loved to sing atop mountains, in streets, on buses... and that would hardly be appropriate for a nun with a vow of silence! And yes, for many years afterwards the convent-based singing and speaking scenes in the aforementioned movie did confuse me a little.

So the nun aspirations quickly abated, but I then changed tack and went for nursing, only to discover that nurses had to see blood and people's insides! Well, hey, that was a revelation! I had hitherto assumed that all the yukky bits were hidden by bandages (and never once considered that it was the nurses who put them there in the first place). Again, my Gran - ever the great career adviser - was the one who told me the truth about nursing and regaled me with gruesome stories of her youth as a nurse. Which promptly made me re-think the career option again, and so I ended up back at teaching. And there I settled - with vague ambitions to be a teacher.

I got there in the end - albeit as a TEFL teacher - via a few stints in tour guiding, hotel management, holiday repping, marketing and museum guiding. Apart from the work in the museum - which really filled me with a love of history and a desire to learn more, this is the one job that I've done that makes me glow inside.

Some days I don't feel it, true enough... I get bogged down by something negative, or some nagging, awful stress. But then, I walk down the corridor and hear my students shouting my name, and I see their smiles. And I know that for that hour, that day, or that year - in that all-too-brief period in our lives that we know as childhood - that I am someone who is helping them grow. When one of my students shouts my name, and proudly shows me their new pencil case, or eraser, or sticker - it feels precious. When they run over, glowing with pride at their newly-formed words, scratched laboriously in soft HB - they grin, and I grin, too.