"A Tuti Ta"

One thing most people do not know about me is what I have the greatest passion for, and that is children. Ever since I was a young child “school” was always my favorite game to play. I could play school for hours, I loved setting up the classroom, coming up with a fake class list, making worksheets, and even hanging up posters and making bulletin boards, and that was only the preparation. I would then take forever reading to a fake class, teaching them about science, math, history, or English, for hours!! My voice would sometimes even become sore. This game started to turn into reality when I was in the fourth grade.
Every summer starting in the fourth grade I would go into the elementary school where my mom worked and I attended and I would help all the teachers set up their classrooms, sometimes it was sharpening pencils or laminating and cutting out posters but I didn’t mind I loved doing all of it. The teachers started catching on and would beg for my help each year, I loved it, and I felt so wanted. Once I got into high school I stopped working at the school and only went in to visit when my mom wanted me to help out with events. I started to drift away from the career of a teacher and was looking into other things I might want to do, such as, acting.
In my junior year of high school, however I started to notice that whenever I went somewhere, where there were kids I was always around them, more so than adults. I started to realize that I enjoyed their company a great deal. I also saw that acting wasn’t a realistic major and that teaching is something I could positively see myself doing. So I took an Early Childhood class, in this class we would go into a head start class with four year olds and we would come up with lesson plans and teach them. The head start classroom was in our school and so it was very accessible. I enjoyed the class so much, I loved making lesson plans and both my teacher and I found that I was very good at it, and more creative than I had ever thought.
Being a teacher in the head start classroom was very natural to me, even the head start teachers commented on how good I was with the children. In my senior year I got to take the Early Childhood 2 class, where it was the same only we were focusing more on how to be a daycare manager. We still got to go in and work with the kids, and make up lesson plans too. This year was especially significant on the influence of me becoming a teacher because of one specific child. Carl was the wild child of the classroom, and was always mis behaving, he got worse as the year went on. He was disrespecting the teachers and would not listen to them. One day I had gone into the classroom and had found Carl and was playing with him, he was pretending that he had lost his straw to his drink when really he had hid it behind him; however I went along with it. Later the head start teachers had told my teacher that Carl hadn’t played like that with a teacher in a long time. When I found this out it surprised me and made me wonder “why me?”
For the lesson plans we always had to teach the kids one song and read them a story every time we went into the head start. I had learned a song from my experiences working in a kindergarten class though another class called Teacher Cadet that I was also enrolled in. The song was called “A Tuti Ta” it was very strange, but the kids seemed to love it. So I took it to the head start class, and I came to find that they too absolutely loved the song. The kids every day after that requested that we sing that song every time we came. We didn’t but we did do it very often. One day Carl’s case worker came up to me and asked me for the lyrics to the song, she said that he loved it and it was about the only thing that would get him to listen to her or the teachers, she said it was all he talked about, and he would go around singing what he remembered from the song all of the time. This touched me, I felt so special that my simple idea to teach them the song had had the impact it did on Carl.
Carl and the Early Childhood class really made me want to teach. I want to feel like that all the time, what other job rewards you in such an amazing way? I can’t wait until the day when I have my own kindergarten class and I am teaching them “A Tuti Ta.”