Minor Piece

Practice What You Teach

By Allison Peda

I have to ask myself, “When did I stop practicing what I preach?” I hate the phrase “Those who can’t, teach;” because I can, I did, I used to. Maybe that’s the problem, “used to”. At what point did my life become so much about them that it stopped being about me? Something that used to be my strength, my joy, my release has completely disappeared from my life and been replaced with red pens.

In third grade I was quoted in the newspaper as saying “I don’t see the point of English, no one is ever going to ask me what a verb or a noun is when I grow up.” That’s a future English teacher. I guess it’s kind of obvious that my relationship with writing has been tumultuous since the beginning. As an educator, I’ve seen that it is often hard for students to embrace something they are good at, especially if that thing is devalued culturally. I didn’t want to be good at writing, I wanted to be good at Math and Science. I wanted to have one of those “hero” Scientist jobs, like a nuclear physicist (whatever that is) or a biochemist who found the cure for cancer after befriending some rainforest apes who would show me the ways of their kind. Yeah, as a culture we don’t really celebrate writers, it’s not fun to watch someone sit at a keyboard or a typewriter or a notebook (or whatever weapon of choice) while she thinks and occasionally rethinks, love that backspace action! Occasionally some author will come along and almost reach the point of celebrity so that in some circles it’s actually cool to read; J.K. Rowling, George R.R. Martin, etc. However, these were not the stories of my youth. The kid who asked people to read her every piece of written information that she came across from cereal boxes to Fletcher and Xenobia, thought her future lay in equations. I was always in Honors English classes until I wasn’t because my apathy and laziness led me back to general ed.

I entered college at Indiana University in Bloomington as a Biology major. I had tested out of Freshman level English, and decided to take the take the more advanced class because college was going to be different. It was. I walked into class on the first day and saw 14 people sitting at a round table staring at their shoes, picking at their nails, desperately trying to avoid eye contact with our professor and each other. It was a writing class with a focus on ecology, I had no idea. We had conversations in that class that I was not prepared for mentally, but I wanted to be a part of spiritually. We spent classes outside reading and writing. We spent an entire class walking along the Jordan River on campus picking up trash and observing our environment; our reading and research literally came alive around us. Through a series of amazing experiences and fantastic educators, I came to embrace my love of writing, of the way that literature and language reflects us at our best and very worst. I realized that I actually loved to write; I loved reasearch; I loved discovering new things with words not microscopes. So I leaned in, I became an English major and eventually went to Graduate school though the Urban Teacher’s Education Program. I really was going to change the world. I was published in journals, presented at conferences, and won awards for academic scholarship.