“I want students to be able to say these things when they leave me: I am a worthwhile person; I deserve a place on this earth; I am successful; I am ready for whatever the world throws at me - today or tomorrow.” - Roberta Ford
I believe that every student who enters my classroom has the ability to learn and to live up to all of their individual natural abilities. I feel that it is my job as an educator to facilitate the constructive and productive growth of each and every one of my students. I like to learn the personal passions and distinct drives of each individual student in order to steer them in the direction of an attainable path that moves them toward their future goals. I like to foster student success. Why? Because, I have encountered so many young students in the Philadelphia area, the city of my birth, who favor me in outward looks and appearance who genuinely need a good teacher in their lives. I give to my students lessons that I had to learn in a visceral sense, i.e., the hard way. I learned when I got accepted to Harvard University as a seventeen year old senior at the urban Philadelphia School District, Overbrook High School that no adult would instruct me on how to find the funding to cover the gap in the partial scholarship that was offered. This was my top school choice and yet I had to take the full scholarship being offered by The Pennsylvania State University because the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) was not introduced to me until my sophomore year of college. I learned that inequality existed in the world when my undergraduate advisor told me vehemently that he would not advise me in my accepted major of agricultural and biological engineering not because I was “Black” (and he emphasized this word as if it left a horrific taste in his mouth) but actually because I was “female.” He stated that the industry that I was trying to enter into was “dominated by the White man.” I felt the sting of this same lesson again two decades later when my graduate school advisor told me that he was not going to advise me on which classes to take because he did not believe that I could succeed until I proved it to him by taking and passing some undergraduate courses; courses that I had successfully completed to earn my undergraduate degree. Now is every student required to jump through such hoops, or just Black students like me? There were many other lessons that racist people tried to impose upon me during my journey to secure degrees of higher learning but, for the sake of brevity, I will not list the innumerous ones here.
However, it is these lessons of injustice, inequality, and discrimination I have sought to overcome for myself, my family, my loved ones, and my past and future students. I have broken through some walls so that those who come behind me can just run through them. I have a passion to be an educator because I know from my ancestral past those who fought the entirety of their lives for social justice, positive change, and the humane treatment of Black people worldwide did so to improve my life. I educate because it was once illegal to even teach a human being that walked this earth and favored me to read. It is abhorrent that there was once a time it was criminal to teach a Black person how to read when they were stolen from what I believe was actually the most highly intelligent continent of people pre-slavery times. I educate because calculus was stolen from Africa as it was used to build the Sphinx and the pyramids. I educate because freshman calculus was the last class I had to pass in order to obtain my first degree and it almost prevented me from accomplishing that goal. I desire to be an educator simply because I want to make sure everything good and scholarly that I have been blessed to obtain in my time on this earth gets passed down to improve the lives of those students who look like me who will follow in my collegiate footsteps. I educate today because my ancestors fought to live so I could be alive today to pass the knowledge acquired down to the others who look like us. My ancestors quite possibly yours as well
made sure that I am free and free to learn and teach!
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