Final Day: A successful attempt?

In my first post on this blog for LTS1, I said that I wanted to try teaching. Even if I had more or less decided that I didn't want to teach for a living, I wanted to try it before I completely rule it out of my future plans. I wanted to try it because so many things in my life point me to it, and continue to, even taking LTS1 in the first place.

This entire attempt of mine at teaching was one I earnestly went about -- I put in my work this summer, and even if it would've been easy to slack off, I didn't. I enjoyed myself, I enjoyed revisiting my own childhood and the things I liked best about it, I enjoyed sharing my knowledge of and love for reading to such an enthusiastic, bright student as Janice. I enjoyed seeing the progress she made, not only in what she could do, but what she wanted to do. I enjoyed making materials, because it brought out a crafty side of me that I'd been wanting to channel (especially for the last day!).

And most of all, just the thought of potentially leaving a positive impact on a kid's life was enough to make me go to class every time, genuinely enjoying what I was doing.

But now I know that teaching is not for me. It's not something I desperately want to do for the rest of my life, unlike writing. I know that now, and I know that my resistance to the family profession is not without basis, because I can say that I was a teacher once, no matter of incapable.

To me, this summer, and my entire LTS experience, is a successful attempt. It's successful precisely because through this experience allowed me to decide on my future, it allowed me to eliminate one big "what if". But in another sense, it's also successful because I think that while I was debating with myself on my hopes and ambitions, I helped build someone else's future. I've done that before through my writing -- a close writer friend of mine who contributes for a major editorial/opinion-based website told me that I was the reason why she began writing. But somehow, this LTS experience felt different. In a good way.