What reason

So, I have been trying to stay off the blogging bandwagon, but here we are. Especially with an original  name like 'What Eva.' But as my brother pointed out, with a name like that, you just need to embrace it. And this blog is about me and WHAT is important to me. I guess it is with that in mind that I start this blog.

For background information purposes, I am training to become a teacher - while some of you will turn off now and start snoring, I absolutely love what I am doing. Even though It drives me crazy, I have so much fun.

Something rather wonderful happened this week, something that reaffirms why I am becoming a teacher.
But before I can write about that,  I need to start my story about 8 years ago. This makes me feel old. and rather dramatic - but I can work with that.

 Anyway, 8 years ago, I was in my last year of intermediate. It was a really tough year for me. My dad got really sick and... well, yeah. my dad got really sick, I think that explains it enough. But this story isn't about that, it is about the teacher that was with me at the time.  I don't even know how to describe her. She was tiny - probably just taller than me, - but she was...

She was tough, and expected the best out of each of us and would never be satisfied by anything less. She taught us to question and dig deeper and treated us like adults. But the most important thing is that none of us ever questioned that she cared. We all knew that she would do absolutely anything for us, and she did. She supported us through what turned out to be a crazy year for all of us. And she did not have an easy life, she was going through some really, really hard times. But she used that to strengthen herself and in turn, her class.

I was reading through some old emails and I found some that she had written to me up to a year after I had left intermediate. Kind, interested and supportive, even when I wasn't under her care. My time in her class still remain as the hardest, but fondest memories.

Fast forward 8 years and I am uni. Even though we haven't been in contact for more than seven years, I still think of my intermediate teacher a lot in my journey to discovering who I am as a teacher. I even sent an email to her old email address (I don't think she got it) explaining how much I appreciated her, especially after a lesson we had had at uni where we had discussed the qualities of our most effective and influential teachers.

And then, about two weeks ago, I received an event invite on Facebook from an old intermediate class-mate. He proposed a class-reunion which immediately got us to thinking how we could try track our old teacher down. After about a week of all of us searching, using some 'high-level  detective skills'; which sometimes bordered on creepy, we finally got a current email address. With slight trepidation, I sent off an email this morning which had been approved by our class.

 As I was reading through our class' discussion in our attempts to finding her, I was amazed by what came up. Here we were, as 20/21 year olds, doing everything we could to find our old intermediate school teacher. Someone even joked about using apples to lure her in - she absolutely loved them and even had it as her numberplate. Another student remembered that she had some food-allergies and was trying to find a place we could meet up that suited  that. Many commented that she had been 'by far' their most 'influential teacher' as well.

This evening I got a reply. There have been few times where I have felt that excited to see a name pop up. Even with the short message that she wrote, she again made me feel important and that I made a difference. We will hopefully be able to organise a time for our reunion that suits everyone soon.

 In sitting here tonight, staring at the next 6 weeks of crazy uni assignments and classes and feeling slightly overwhelmed by it all, I realised why I am doing what I am doing. If I can be even  half as influential on my students lives as this teacher has been for us, my teaching career will have been successful. If my students, after nearly a decade of being in my class, try to find me so they can catch up with me, I know I have done my job.

Sometimes I get discouraged thinking 'what effect can I have on my students when I only have them for one year?!' But it doesn't take long for someone to make a difference. It just takes some faith and for someone to care.

And this is probably why I haven't started a blog before now - it comes out as a novel... But here it is. Something that means a lot to me - and if you don't care, then...

What Eva