Homegrown Scholar: Before I Became a Teacher

A Decade of Learning About Learning Pt 1

I hit a major milestone this year. It has been ten years since I first stepped into classrooms and began my journey in education. As I've settled into summer break, I've found myself reflecting on that accomplishment and looking more deeply at what I've built, how I built it, and how unusual my path has been.

When I was in graduate school, I attended a professional and career development workshop. During one of the sessions, someone gave me a piece of advice that has stayed with me ever since. They told me to lean into the differences in my story and career path. They could see that I was taking a nontraditional route—even within education—and encouraged me to stop treating that as something to explain away and instead embrace it as a strength.

Over the past decade, I've done exactly that. I've taught in elementary classrooms, high school classrooms, college classrooms, community programs, youth leadership spaces, and adult learning environments. I've been a teacher, mentor, researcher, facilitator, mother, and lifelong learner. As I prepare to step into the next chapter of my life as a woman, educator, and parent, I feel a responsibility to give back what has been given to me. This series is my attempt to do that. Over the coming months, I'll be sharing some of the lessons, questions, and insights I've gathered during my first ten years in education.

Long before I became a teacher, I was a reader.

I grew up with my grandparents. My grandfather was retired from the automotive industry in California, and my grandmother was a homemaker. They lived primarily on Social Security, and I have vivid memories of my grandfather collecting aluminum cans to supplement their income before eventually returning to work in fast food. He was a Korean War veteran, but despite being offered opportunities to move into management positions, having only a sixth-grade education and being an older man made those opportunities difficult to sustain. Instead, he spent decades working behind the scenes in restaurant kitchens.

My grandfather worked at the local Pizza Hut from the time I was in third grade until I was in my early twenties. Ironically, it would later become my first job as well.

Although we didn't have much money, I grew up surrounded by love. I was raised almost like an only child and was spoiled in many ways by my grandparents. Some of that love showed up through food, which contributed to my struggles with weight later in life. But it also showed up in something else: books.

My love of reading began with my grandfather.

Every Sunday, he would sit with me and read the newspaper comics. He called them "the funny papers." He didn't just read them—he performed them. He did the voices, acted out the characters, and made the stories come alive. My absolute favorites were the Archie comic books. I looked forward to those moments every week.

Looking back now, I realize those Sunday mornings were about much more than comics. They were my first lessons in literacy, storytelling, imagination, and connection. Long before I studied reading instruction, literacy development, or educational theory, someone was helping me fall in love with words.

Books quickly became my best friends growing up. I was picked on in school, and when things felt difficult socially, I escaped into reading. Outside of the bullying, I genuinely loved school. I was a strong reader, and most of the academic work came easily to me. Looking back, I realize how deeply literacy was woven into my elementary school experience.

I still remember completing D.O.L. (Daily Oral Language) exercises in those beige composition notebooks and seeing reading emphasized everywhere I went. The Scholastic Book Fair was one of the biggest events of the school year. I would excitedly carry home the colorful flyer and begin my campaign to convince my grandmother to let me order the latest books. I devoured series like The Baby-Sitters Club, Sweet Valley Twins, Sweet Valley High, and the American Girl collection. I was also a proud participant in the Pizza Hut Book It program, earning personal pan pizzas for reading goals.

At home, my grandparents still had my uncle's set of World Book Encyclopedias from the 1960s. I spent countless hours flipping through those volumes, learning about places, people, animals, and events far beyond my neighborhood. I also loved typing stories on my uncle's old Smith Corona typewriter. This was before most families had computers at home, so technology was something we experienced occasionally in the school computer lab while playing Number Munchers and Oregon Trail.

While reading came naturally to me, math was a different story. Around third or fourth grade, math started becoming more challenging. Homework would take me forever to complete, and I often found myself frustrated. My grandmother hired tutors to help me, and something strange would happen: I could successfully work through the problems with my tutor, but when it came time to take the test, I would freeze and perform poorly.

At the time, I didn't have the language to explain what was happening. Looking back now as an educator, I wonder how much of my struggle had less to do with ability and more to do with confidence, anxiety, and my developing relationship with learning itself.

Middle school marked a major shift in my life.

At Cashman, the bullying that had defined much of elementary school largely stopped, but the social challenges didn't disappear. They simply changed form. Instead of being openly picked on, I often felt excluded. I watched other kids have experiences that felt out of reach for me and spent a lot of time living vicariously through my friends, television, music, and teen culture in the 1990s. I became obsessed with fitness magazines and would save articles featuring women who had lost fifty pounds or more. I would stare at those stories and wish that could be me. In my mind, losing weight would unlock the normal teenage experience I believed everyone else was having.

My grandparents loved me deeply, but they were also very protective. I didn't spend much time going out with friends or participating in many of the social experiences that seemed common among my peers. Thankfully, I had a phone in my room, which became my lifeline to the outside world. By this point, I had friends and a social circle, but I still struggled with feeling like I belonged. I never had boys who liked me, and my self-esteem continued to suffer. This was also the period when my grades began to decline.

The summer after sixth grade, we moved, and I began attending Hyde Park Middle School. Once again, I found myself being the new kid. I spent much of that year in the library working on research projects and finding comfort in books because I didn't know anyone. The transition was difficult, and middle school kids can be incredibly unkind. Eventually, I made friends, but the emotional weight I was carrying continued to affect my relationship with school.

By eighth grade, my grades were terrible. I nearly failed the year. I remember hiding progress reports and report cards from my grandparents because I was embarrassed and afraid of disappointing them. When my family confronted me about my grades, I didn't know how to explain what was happening. The truth is, I didn't fully understand it myself.

Looking back now, I realize I wasn't struggling because I lacked the ability to do the work. I was struggling emotionally. But at the time, there was very little language around mental health, especially in communities of color. We didn't talk about depression, body image, self-esteem, or emotional well-being the way we do today.

For years, I thought this chapter of my life was simply a story about bad grades. Now, as an educator, I see something different. I see a young person whose academic performance was reflecting struggles that had very little to do with intelligence and everything to do with how she felt about herself.

By the time I entered high school, I was still carrying the habits and struggles that had followed me through middle school. My freshman year was largely a continuation of what had come before. I wasn't doing my work, my grades were poor, and I was drifting through school without much direction.

But somewhere during that year, I began to realize something that would change the trajectory of my life.

I looked at the sacrifices my grandparents were making to raise me and the challenges they had faced throughout their lives. I knew I loved them deeply, but I also knew I didn't want to spend my adulthood struggling financially the way they had. High school suddenly felt temporary. Four years wasn't really that long. I started asking myself questions that felt very grown up for a teenager: What kind of work was I going to do? How was I going to support myself? What would my life look like after graduation?

The answer I came up with was surprisingly simple.

I needed to get back on my smart kid stuff.

No one on my mother's side of the family had gone to college, but somewhere along the way I decided that college would be my path forward. If I wanted a different future, I was going to have to create it myself. So, beginning in tenth grade, I made a conscious decision to turn things around.

One of the biggest influences during that time was Upward Bound. A friend introduced me to the program, and it became one of the most important experiences of my high school years. Upward Bound helped me see possibilities that I hadn't fully imagined before. It allowed me to spend time on college campuses and picture myself as a future college student. Suddenly, higher education felt real and attainable instead of something that happened to other people.

This was the late 1990s, long before students could simply search online for answers. I had to teach myself how to navigate the college process. I wrote letters to universities requesting information, waited for brochures and application packets to arrive in the mail, and spent hours at the library researching schools and careers.

Despite my renewed focus, one challenge never seemed to leave me alone: math.

Math had been difficult for me since elementary school, and high school was no exception. I spent much of my high school career in remedial math classes and attended summer school for two consecutive years just to get academically caught up. I didn't take Algebra until eleventh grade. Even as my grades improved in other subjects, math remained a constant source of frustration and anxiety.

My greatest challenge came near the end of high school when I nearly didn't graduate because of my low score on the proficiency exam. I was placed in after-school tutoring and moved into a class focused specifically on test-taking strategies and proficiency preparation. After months of work, I finally passed the exam just a few months before graduation.

By the time I graduated in 2001, I had successfully enrolled myself in more rigorous classes and rebuilt much of my academic confidence. However, the consequences of my freshman year remained. My GPA was only a 2.0 because I was still carrying the weight of those earlier failures. I graduated knowing I was capable of more than my transcript suggested.

That summer, I enrolled at the local community college. At the time, my decision wasn't driven by school spirit, campus life, or the traditional college experience. My goal was simple: community college was a bridge to somewhere else.

There wasn't much happening on campus in terms of student life or social engagement, but that was perfectly fine with me. I had a plan. I knew my GPA wasn't competitive enough to take me directly where I wanted to go, so I viewed community college as an opportunity to build momentum and create academic mobility for myself.

At the time, my dream schools were Spelman College, Howard University, Clark Atlanta University, and UNLV. As a first-generation college student, I didn't have a roadmap for how to navigate higher education. Much of what I learned came through trial and error, asking questions, reading materials, and figuring things out as I went along.

Looking back, I realize that community college taught me an important lesson: sometimes the most important part of a journey isn't where you start—it's knowing where you're trying to go.

The community college years would eventually lead me into some of the most transformative experiences of my life. But that's a story for another post.

Coming Next:

Homegrown Scholar, Part 2: Leaving Las Vegas