My Journey to Teaching

A paraprofessional in my district who is considering becoming an English teacher recently asked me what my favorite thing about teaching English is and what my path was to get to where I am today. Because I always write 2,000 words when 200 will do, I decided to blog about this question and send her the link.

Ashley, I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!

I came to teaching English through a pretty interesting path. As a high school student, I loved school, not necessarily for the social aspect as I didn’t have a ton of friends, but because I really loved learning in my classes. I especially enjoyed my English classes because I had some pretty great English teachers while I was in high school. I had three English teachers during my time at Norman County East.

In 7th grade, I had Tim Lutz. He’s now the superintendent of the Bemidji school district. We did a really great project that year where we chose abandoned buildings in our communities and wrote about their history. This whole project culminated with a banquet at the Hjemkomst Center in Moorhead where all of our individual stories were published in an anthology that was given to us that evening. I still have mine. I wrote about a country church about three or four miles away from my house (Norman Lutheran) that had just closed the year or two before. (Fun fact: my 7th-grade math teacher was none other than Kevin McKeever.) (To those reading this whose name isn’t Ashley, Kevin is the principal at my current district, Win-E-Mac.)

In 8th through 10th grade, I had what my classmates liked to call a “Grammar Nazi”. Her big test on prepositions consisted of a blank sheet of paper with the directions “write the 60 most common prepositions from memory”. She was so intense, but I also learned a LOT from her. She brought us down to the old locker rooms under the gym and asked us to use descriptive language to capture everything we could see, smell, hear, and touch, (but for the love of God, Blake, don’t taste anything!)

This teacher, Mary Swenson, is also where I credit my love of theatre, and musical theatre especially. We studied the Diary of Anne Frank, like every 8th grader ever, but we also saw a production of it at the Guthrie as a class trip. In 9th grade, we saw Romeo and Juliet at the Guthrie. This was after we had studied it so extensively that we even paired off and chose scenes from the play to perform for the class. (I played Romeo in a scene opposite Ben Revier, who would be a cousin to Tommy Revier, who played Friar Laurence.)

As the tenth graders, we studied Macbeth, which we didn’t see at the Guthrie. Instead, we saw a Fargo-Moorhead Community Theatre production. The director had taken some really interesting liberties with Macbeth that still make me cringe to this day when I think about it. (The witches as sirens? I mean, come on. The porter scene was HILARIOUS, though. As it should be.) We also studied and watched Much Ado About Nothing, which to this day is my favorite Shakespeare play, and we also studied and watched Les Miserables, which is still one of my favorite musicals.

So many great memories of her classes. As tenth graders, we took yet another field trip, this one to Concordia College’s Carl B. Ylvisaker Library in Moorhead. We really learned to do research in her classes. We learned to cite our sources and to find the best sources available. We spent a lot of time in the periodicals section at “Carl B”. This was for a project (an essay and a presentation) that focused on a famous photograph from history. Mrs. Swenson started by showing the class several pictures and asked us to research the story behind it. I chose a picture from the Kent State Massacre in 1970.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Swenson is dead now. She went into what should have been a simple, routine surgery, but she didn’t survive. Concordia Church in Fertile was packed to the rafters for that funeral. My classmate Blake also died too young. Snowmobile accident.

As a junior and senior, I was in college English, which was taught by Yvonne Opdahl. She was the total opposite of Mrs. Swenson. My class liked to think of her as a hippie, flower-child kind of English teacher. She liked to ask how the texts made us feel, and weekly journaling was a requirement in her classes. I wrote so much in my journal as a senior that it was held together by tape and a prayer by the end of the year.

Somewhere along the way, I discovered my love of Harry Potter. At NCE, we had these reading periods. They were only about 20 minutes long, but everyone (even the teachers) were supposed to stop what they were doing and read. My group was in the library, which I loved because I had all the school’s books at my fingertips. However, I stuck pretty close to the fantasy section, as it was (and still is) my favorite genre. I opened the first Harry Potter, and I fell in love from the very first page. From there, I read the other three books on the shelf and watched the movies; I even created my own Harry Potter fan website after I read a book teaching myself HTML, CSS, and a bit of PHP code. Mine never was a hugely popular website, but it became a sort of a release for me as I wrote about these books and movies (and later computer games) that I loved.

When I was a senior, I decided to sign up for a Photoshop class because I thought it would help me do bigger and better things with my website. I learned pretty quickly, though, that I don’t have a great talent for visual art, so within two days, I dropped that class, and the school approved an independent study that I created to rebuild and maintain the Norman County East website. I even walked down to the Twin Valley Times offices once a week to update their website.

It was due to my experience with computers that when I declared my first major at Concordia in Moorhead, it was Computer Science. Had there been a focus in web design there, I might have stayed with the program. Instead, I was doing C++ in my classes, and I absolutely hated it. It was too much math and not enough creative writing. It was in that moment that I realized I loved working on my own website not because I loved the coding aspect, but because I loved writing.

So I signed up for some writing classes: I took poetry, nonfiction, and fiction writing. I learned from my poetry professor that some of the best poetry comes from some of our darkest times (which I happened to be going through a little bit at that time because not having a clear plan terrifies me). During nonfiction writing class, I wrote a ten-page story about my experience losing a classmate. (The two-page assignment was much harder for me.) My fiction writing class I took during the summer with only four other students. It was awesome.

After taking these classes, I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with them. Did I want to be a writer? There’s no guaranteed success in that unless I became a journalist or a technical writer. So I talked to my mom about it. She had been a fifth-grade teacher for twenty-some years by that point in her life. It was funny watching her try to talk me into teaching English while at the same time complain about the bad experiences she’d had while teaching.

Ultimately, I took her advice. I enrolled in the English Education program. I had to overload some semesters to finish in four years, but I did it. There were four other English Ed majors that graduated with me, but as far as I know, only two of us are still teaching. (Hi, Kristin!)

It’s been quite the roller coaster ride, but I am glad to be where I am today. I love being an English teacher. I love reading plays in class. I love teaching poetry and grammar. I love discussing big questions and themes as they relate back to the stories and novels that we’re reading in class. I love it all!

If you have any questions, leave them in the comments, or email me directly at ahanson@wemschools.org.