A Mind is The Wrong Thing to Waste!

The definition of ignorance is the lack of knowledge, unawareness of something often important.  Why should that be the first thing I write about?  I was once ignorant and even stupid to the idea that education was not something that I needed as a young black student.  Many people in my past told me that I was averaged.  I remember telling one of my cute, male teacher that I wanted to become a lawyer.  He laughed in my face and said “Get real!  Try something in business.”  To him, when I thought about it later, he was giving me his best advice but to me he set limits on my life.  Another cute male teacher later told me that I should think about going into doing hair or nails.  “You know, something girly!”  That is the way he put it.  I continued to believe them.  A young black female with goals that noone believed in and even walked over  in their haste to educate me.  I often sit and think about those misplaced comments that many people gave to me over the years.  Many were not intended to set limits on my life but nevertheless they did.  With those comments still ringing in my head, I set out to do what I could to scrape out a life for myself.  I went from college to college looking for what I, as a young black girl, could do and still make a living.  Little did I know, I was taking their advice and applying the limits.  I unknowly looked at myself as this or that because that is what they said I was, so why not? I worked odd jobs and was never satified until one day a friend  said she was working at a school.  She gushed for more than a half hour about how her students did this and that.  I was struck!  Teaching!  The heavens opened up!  The angels began to sing and I floated off to yet another college.  I began to enjoy learning new and what I deemed “important” things.  How to treat students.  How different students are from each other and how to really get deeper learning to each child.  Looking back on my education, college was not meantioned in any way to our kind in high school.  We were seen to be factory workers and attendents but never doctors and lawyers.  It was unheard of for you to even mention the fact that you wanted to be more than what they wanted you to do.  If your mother and father did not finish high school, the best you could do, according the my teachers, was to finish what they started. I believed that for  more than 10 years after I finished high school.  Until I found my true calling.  I started out clean dirty bathroom stalls as the middle school janitor until I could do better. I am currently a teacher/ coach at a local high school and I am working toward finishing my masters degree.  I will then continue with a doctorate in Education to secure a superintendent job before retiring.  These are still my goals and dreams.  I started out cleaning the bathroom but I will end up owning them.  I had to learn that people don’t have to agree with what you want to do in life.  YOU must agree.  Their opinions do not matter.  I make it my life’s work to agree with every child who come to me and says “I want to be a doctor, lawyer or even a ditch digger.”  I do not want to set limits on any child like those  set limits on me many years ago.  Do not allow any more young boys, girls, men or women to waste their minds simply because you don’t agree with their dreams.  A mind, whatever color the package, is  the wrong thing to waste.  Plant a seed in young, fertile soil and reep a huge harvest!