Right Where I Need To Be

It is right where I need to be: on one side of a climactic showdown in a spaghetti western.  I stand at the front of the room, giving my best possible Clint Eastwood stare, while every imaginable worst case scenario runs through my mind, begging me to cry out in fear and run from the room.  Forty-six eyes stare right back at me.  They wait.  They beckon.  I didn’t know eyes could talk, but these seem to be taunting me: “Go ahead.  Your move.”  I can almost hear a Sergio Leone score fluttering in the air.  Eternity passes in five minutes.

BANG!

The bell rings, signaling the end of passing period, and a classroom of twenty-three high school students flinches.  The first day of school can now carry on.

I never expected to be facing down a room of high school students because I never planned on becoming a teacher.  In my senior year of college, my days were filled with the construction of a robot that was supposed to kick a football for our senior design project.  My nights were filled with producing a student-run musical theatre company.  I am fairly confident in my math skills and robots plus tap shoes should not equal Catholic educator.   But as I went through the grind of career fairs and emails and cover letters and resumes and first-round interviews and thank you emails and second-round interviews and site visits, I couldn’t help but think that none of these companies was where I needed to be.

ACE had a different feel.  After a pastoral staff member from ACE visited my classroom one day, I began browsing the website.  I read about college graduates going out to teach across the country and knew this was it.  This is what I had been missing!  A place where I could talk all day about science and still rehearse at night for theatre.  But even more than that, I realized what all those other interviews had been missing: a calling.  A vocation.  Use whatever word you like, but after months of searching, I finally felt that I could do something that makes a difference.  And every day I get a chance to make a difference by sharing my experiences with my students.

Now, in my second year in ACE, there are no more spaghetti western showdowns.  I still feel like Clint Eastwood at times, but it is less The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and more Gran Torino: I try to act tough but deep down I can’t help but smile.  I just want my students to succeed.  I just want to leave the world in a better place and education is one way that I can do that.  I still stand at the front of the room and look around at my students, but the eyes no longer taunt me.  Instead, they ask: “What are we going to do today?”  I breathe a sigh of relief because, at this moment, I am right where I need to be.