Back when I ventured to Loyola University Chicago as a young 18 year old, I signed up for a program call "Loyola 4 Chicago" that got students volunteering in the city 4 hours a week. I was placed with a group tutoring at a new school on Chicago's west side, Chicago Jesuit Academy. On our very first week we trekked out in a 15-passenger Loyola van to a soccer field where we would just watch the boys from the school play. As an introduction to who we were working with, we saw their neighborhood, their population, and observed their first soccer practice. I remember turning around to see the city skyline behind me, Sears tower standing tall above the others, Hancock off a few (now) familiar blocks. I took in the sight with all my excitement, anxiety, and homesickness that I had as a September college freshman.
My experience tutoring 4 hours per week, combine with the classes I was taking at Loyola and the things I was experiencing in Chicago, led me to my current calling: teaching. It was Thanksgiving break my freshman year when I came home and said "mom, dad, I think I want to switch my major to education..."
Fast forward to now: I am in my second year of teaching in Chicago Public Schools at a high-performing K-8 school full of low-income students. It comes with all its challenges, victories, ups and downs, highs and lows. It has humbled me beyond belief and reminded me I am not, in fact, super-human. But I am passionate and I am teaching for reasons that are not written in curly fonts on a wooden trinket on my desk "June, July, and August." I am teaching for reasons that are bigger than myself. And I got a reminder of that last week. I hopped off the bus, aware of where I was but not really aware. I was going to a launch meeting for a program I am part of that brings arts into the classroom. It was at the Mexican American Art Museum which sits next to a park I had to walk through. As I walked, taking in the fall September air, the city skyline, the sound of kids playing sports in the park, I was transported back to that moment I described earlier. Yes, it was in this very park in a very similar moment that it all began... that I was called to be an educator of young, malleable minds in a city that has grown to mean so much to me. It was when I started to see teaching as an art form, as a way I could express my own creativity. It was when I realized education was the civil rights movement of my generation. And now God has little Hannah Foster from Memphis, Tennessee who was a pain to her teachers and a goofball to everyone else, in charge of little minds in Chicago who look to her for answers, for an example, for someone to finally not let them down. Someone remind me.... how did I get here?
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