A Block (Laura)

"One of my biggest pet peeves, I would say, is probably when someone is humming when they do not know the tune, because then it's just, like, off and distracts you from listening to the song or whatever you are listening to. Just people humming in general can be very  annoying. There's somebody in my class who’s, like, always humming and it gets really hard to focus.  I realize that's definitely a big pet peeve for me.  People in my class don't usually hum, but, like, in the past few months, people have been humming a lot more than normal. Yes I do hum, but when you do your pet peeve it's not really annoying!”

“Right after I had my son Ronnie I only took 6 weeks of maternity leave; I probably should have taken longer. I was at work, and I was a new mom. My baby was really close to me. We lived on campus, and I was crying all the time. I'm not much of a cryer, much more so after I had kids. It took me 4 months to realize that I probably had postpartum depression. It was impacting my work and my relationships. So I got a therapist and I started going regularly. I think about how hard it was for me to see. I felt normal, but I wasn't acting normal, I didn't know how much I was suffering. It became really hard to get through the day. I think about my day now and how I am fully functional, and I think back to what I was doing back then and how hard it was to realize that it was happening, because I felt like I was at 100 percent, but I absolutely was not.”

"I went to a camp called Deer Hill expeditions. I'd never been to sleepaway camp before; Deer Hill was 20 days. Five days were spent at base camp. Five days were doing service in Hopi Nation, and five days for canoeing and five days for backpacking. It was hard. The toughest part was that it was a lot of time away from home, that it was a lot of tough physical activity. For instance, in canoeing, which was the first leg of the journey, we were swarmed by mosquitoes. I had like 30 bites on my leg. And I also had an allergic reaction to the mosquito bites. I really love the service component, where we spent some days on Hopi Nation, helping a guy named Marshall. It was really cool. We learned about the Hopi and unfortunately, there was a rainstorm, so we had to move on. And then the final leg of the journey was backpacking. That was rough. I had on a 40 pound backpack, yeah, up and up and up in like five miles every day, which isn't that much, but it hurt. Overall, I'm very proud I did it, because it's not something I would have thought I was capable of a couple years ago, and it made me feel a lot more confident in myself, and it's allowed me to believe and to know that I am capable of things that I never would have dreamed of."

"I thought I was gonna be a doctor. I really thought I was gonna be an eye doctor. I worked in an optometrist office in highschool during the summer and I worked there after college as well. Working there I was like, I really like eyes. They’re really fun, but I could never do this as a job. I never thought I’d be a teacher. My mom was a teacher, my sister, my sister in law, two aunts, three cousins, grandmother. I said I didn’t have the patience for it. I never thought I’d be a teacher, ever in my life. I ended up living at home, unemployed. My mom said, “Come substitute. You need to get out of the house and make money.” I came in, I substituted and they said, “You know science. Can you be a long-term sub?” I said, “Sure! That’s more money than I could be getting.” Then I was in the classroom for three days and started falling in love with teaching. I thought I would be an eye doctor. Optometry school is a little different than medical school, it would’ve been four years after college. I thought I was gonna be doing optometry for the rest of my life. I realized I didn’t want it as much. It’s a lot different than I thought it was going to be because I’d never thought I’d be teaching, and I definitely thought I was going to be a doctor. And I never knew."

"To me, clearly and effectively communicating to people is really important. When I was teaching in Korea, I taught an all boys school. At first, we were all really scared to talk to each other. And if they tried to talk in Korean I could understand a little, but not enough for them to explain their deepest, innermost thoughts. That was very difficult. But over time, we did find ways to communicate. With imperfect English and imperfect Korean combined, and because we all wanted to make that effort, we were able to have so many fun times laughing till we were crying in class. And now when I'm here, even when it's hard to teach, when a student's upset I can just be like, “what's up?”, and they can tell me... without a lot of effort. That's actually the dream. I don't know, I think it just makes me appreciate more. All I wanted for years was to be able to connect with students, and I feel like I value it because I remember how hard it was. It definitely made me a better teacher. Teaching across a language barrier is so immensely challenging, that it does make teaching here feel easier. Yeah, I would just say I have a better sense of appreciation for being able to communicate with students directly, in any form, positive or negative, about anything. Because... it's not a given."