I was in eigth grade when I decided to become a history teacher.  My reasoning was very systematic.  It went something like this:

It’s time I decided what I want to be when I grow up.  I know I want to be a teacher, but what do I want to teach?  Elementary school might be fun, but it’s not specialized enough.  I want to impart knowledge.  I have A’s in every class, I could teach anything I wanted to!  What, then?  Not the arts- I don’t feel good enough at those, fun though they are.  Not math- I don’t feel good enough or passionate enough about that either.  Science is fun, but I don’t really understand or care about physics.  Spanish is out- I like learning it but my heart’s just not in it enough to teach.  Hmm, that leaves English and History.  I do really enjoy both of those subjects, but which would I rather teach?  English, I think.

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Well now wait a minute.  Do I like English because I like English or because I have an awesome English teacher right now?  I would hate to dedicate my life to a subject I don’t really love.  I love reading.  I love writing.  I’m even pretty good at correcting other people’s writing.  What’s not to like?
SCENTENCE DIAGRAMING.  Gosh I hate diagraming sentences.  No, I could never teach that.  History it is, then.

In retrospect, I’m really glad I chose history.  I feel like it’s my passion- my calling in life.  I want to be able to show students that history is interesting, to share with them the excitement I feel about it.  I am dedicating my life to something I love.

Even so, I can’t help but notice that it was only after I chose my career path that my grades in math and sciences started to drop.  They didn’t drop far- my lowest grades were in math, and I never got below a C.  (Well, actually I did fail gym once, but that’s an entirely different story.)  I would like to think of this as proof that I chose the right path for myself- that I am doing something I’m genuinely good at.  But what if it’s not the CAUSE of my choice but rather the CONSEQUENCE of it?

For instance, I’ve always been rather interested in the environmental sciences- biology, zoology, botany, etc.  If I had chosen that as my career path, how different would my life be?  There are figures I used to be able to do in my head easily that I now require a calculator for.  It’s embarassing.  If I had chosen a future in science, would my math and science grades, necessitated by my choice, have remained solid A’s?  What about my humanities grades?  By choosing a left-brained profession did I unknowingly shut down a part of my right-brain?

The bottom line is this:  I love history, and I think it is the Right Choice for me.  But could there have been other Right Choices in another world?  Questions to ponder.

People often ask me what surprised me the most about college.  I guess it’s a pretty common question to ask a student.  It’s really a good question to ask a student at a school you’re thinking of attending, for one thing.

It took me a while to come up with my answer, but after some consideration I think it’s this:  The friends I made at school are not the people I would have befriended in high school.  I’m not saying that’s a good or bad thing, necessarily, it’s just true.  Sure, we would have been friendly acquaintences in high school, but these people simply would not have been the people I chose to hang around with outside of school.  But outside of the context of high school, it really doesn’t seem to matter whether we are athletes or geeks, activists or passive observers, pretty or plain, scientists or historians or engineers.  We are simply people with common interests, similar senses of humor, and like tastes.  We are friends.

I think just as good a question would be to ask what surprised me the most about coming home.  I certainly had a few things to choose from.  My parents got rid of our piano, brought a lot of new things into the house from my grandfather’s estate, and re-arranged my room, among other things.  But none of those things fazed me as much as this one small, stupid thing:  My father changed his salad dressing.

For as long as I can remember, my father has always used ranch dressing.  He used it at home, he used it at our favorite pizza place, as far as I know he didn’t use anything else.  So I was very surprized when I came home from college to find out that he had switched from ranch, his old standard, to maple dijon.  It’s not like it actually matters what salad dressing my father uses.  He can use whatever he likes.  It’s just the principle of the thing.  This was not a change in the physical layout of the house, the way things are arranged or the way they look.  This was a personal change.  A personal choice.  It was like my father had changed a part of himself, even if it was a small, unimportant part.  It just put college into perspective for me.  I am going through different things at school, but that doesn’t mean my family will be exactly the same when I come home.  They are entitled to change, and they will absolutely be different people with different experiences just like I will.