A Sense of Purpose

High school was a hard time for me, as it is for many teenagers. It is a time when you decide which paths to take in life. The youth is thrusted out into society, forced to make choices that dictate the rest of their lives. These decisions create not only their future, but the future of our country, our planet.
Late in my senior year in high school, I had a teacher put up an American flag on his wall –but in place of stars, the flag had white business logos. This piqued my curiosity and I began talking to this teacher about what the flag was meant to represent. He introduced me to a magazine called Ad Busters. When I read my first Ad Busters, cover to cover, my life changed forever. I was always socially conscious and interested in politics, but I was also interested in many other things, especially newspaper. Sometimes the two dovetailed, but as a teenager, I did not like the dry, political commentary often found in the press. This magazine was like an answer to a question burning inside of me that I couldn’t communicate to the world. I knew I wanted to study journalism and be a part this media counter-culture.
A career in teaching was always in the back of my mind while I was earning my journalism degree. I realized I wanted to teach media literacy to teenagers when I took my first media theory class in college. Once I learned about how the media works and the impact it has on people, the mysteries of my youth began to unravel. It finally made sense why all the cool kids in school had expensive, brand-name shoes and why I had an impulse to buy Coke even though I thought it tasted like bug spray. The logic behind the banal fifteen minutes of daily required Channel One in high school was revealed to me. It made sense to me why I was so frustrated in high school, like I was bottled, fizzy water waiting to explode.
These unveilings changed the way I relate to the world and how I contribute to society. I was initially outraged at how mass media and advertising brainwashed people, especially vulnerable children. And why was no one doing anything to protect our youth? I then became involved in non-profits whose goal was to enlighten the youth to the ways of the media. I created a personal goal: to mandate the teaching of media literacy into high school curriculum, nationally. As it turns out, it would be easier to move the Sandias to the West side of Albuquerque than accomplish this. I could go to Washington to lobby for change, but I would rather be in the classroom, helping kids. I will do everything I can to educate youth about how we communicate and how we interact with media. The key is to open one mind at a time, with patience and love.
As I finished my journalism degree and began my education degree, I began to pin down exact goals I hope to accomplish as a teacher. I would like to make students more aware of how the world they live in works, especially focusing on how people communicate. I want to give students the tools they need to become productive members of society, to make choices based on their own opinions, not opinions that were carefully created and fed to them through media. I want to encourage students to find their own voice and not feel like they have to follow what was laid out before them. Overall, I want to teach students how to think.
I know this is going to be a tough job. There are so many other parts of teaching that must be taken care of before a student can grow in the way I hope for. But working with kids has always been a pleasure in my life. I want to say that if I touch just one life, it will all be worth it. But I know that is naïve. I know I will be frustrated and aggravated dealing with school boards, other teachers, parents, and even the students. But now it is my turn to help students question society. And although I will probably never put up an Ad Busters flag in my classroom, it is my time to be the teacher that helps answer the burning questions my students can’t communicate. The noblest purpose I can imagine is helping kids learn how to think for themselves.