Alliance for Catholic Education
During my in-person interview for ACE, at the end of the session, my interviewers asked me if I had any questions. I asked, “How did you feel like ACE shaped you as a person?” I still remember Alec Torigian’s answer to this day. “Well, I was raised in my hometown, but I grew up in Mobile, Alabama, where I taught.” That thought has stayed with me throughout my entire ACE journey. I joined this program because I wanted to make a difference educationally in the lives of kids who needed my help, be supported by a strong community, and grow in gratitude in my faith life with God. What I didn’t expect was for my soul to be reformed and reshaped; to end up growing up as much as I did in my younger years alongside my second grade students in a place completely new.
From my best moments of ACE — whether it was hugging my students every day for morning greeting, hearing my favorite student say at the end of the hardest year of my life that I was the nicest teacher they have ever had or will ever have, crying together at a Christmas program with a parent over a particularly difficult students’ successes, or even helping the parents of one of my students become U.S. citizens – to the worst — which included hard conversations with a parent over retaining a student and bullying, teaching a lesson that went totally out of plan, and wanting to throw a tantrum as bad as the one of my second graders was having that day — I no longer view the world through only my eyes. I can also see it from the viewpoint of the intense joy and incredible frustration that second graders feel, as well as through the all encompassing love of their parents. I have lived a million different lives in two years, and will forever owe the way I view the world to my school.
Before ACE, I used to be a perfectionist. Turns out you cannot be a perfect teacher, no matter how hard you try. You have to grow up beyond what you think you know and who you think you are and become the person God has always wanted you to be and other people need you to be. It sounds a bit silly, but my school taught me the reality of being the adult in the room, even though I was only 21 years old when I first started and still feel lost every now and again and call my mom to ask her opinion on things. I now realize that there are some things that you can do your very best at and still struggle with and that it still matters that you try, care and love yourself and others anyway. ACE taught me that I am not perfect and that I will continue to be lost throughout my life, and that that is okay because I am perfect enough for the kids I teach and to help them become who God meant them to be, and I will always find myself through helping others. In fact, it is persevering through my failures that make me such a good model for my students to do the same. Even through all the hard times, thank you, Redemptorist St. Gerard. Thank you for helping me grow up and accept my imperfect self as beautiful. Thank you for teaching me what really matters is the little children and the love that surrounds us in our lives. Most of all, thank you for giving me the ability to view the world with the same unfailing joy and hope as the students I came to love as my own in a little school on Plank Road in East Baton Rouge that is dedicated to showing students who may have believed they would’ve never amounted to anything that they always have been and always will be somebody.