Decisions

I spent the weekend participating in a Strategies for Substitute Teaching class. I also did some reading about Marva Collins.



Sometimes I think I'm like a raccoon who can't help but be hypnotized by shiny things. As soon as someone presents something to me in a way that connects, I want to do it. So now I'm sure I want to be a teacher. Tonight I have my social work class, during which I'll probably switch back to being just as sure that I want to be a social worker. And then sometime tonight, when I'm too tired to do anything about it, I'll remember that what I really want is to be a writer.

I've written a paper for my social work class about Jane Addams and the Hull House.



I would love to be Jane Addams when I grow up. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, which she was awarded for her work with the poor in Chicago. Hull House, where she lived and worked until she died at a ripe old age, was a settlement house in a poor, immigrant-filled Chicago neighborhood. In the late 1880s Jane and her friend Ellen Starr leased an old abandoned mansion built by Charles Hull. They lived there, along with a rotating selection of students and people in helping careers. Jane and Ellen wanted to share their love of art and literature with the poor and believed that everyone deserved culture. Hull House had a kindergarten, day care for working mothers, job training, adult school, an art gallery, a book bindery, the first Little Theater in America, a residence for single mothers and a zillion other resources. It was flexible and changing.

The Hull House still helps tens of thousands of Chicago people every year, even though the mansion is now a museum. Every town should have a Hull House. A place where the poor are empowered instead of kicked when they're down.

See, now I want to be a social worker again. I'm so glad I have some time to decide. I know that I feel a strong pull toward working with people in poverty. I feel almost no desire to work at an upscale school full of middle-class kids. I'd much rather work in a school that really needs dedicated teachers. When we lived in Las Vegas, my kids teachers almost never stayed at the school more than a year because they constantly were moving into rich new schools in swanky neighborhoods. I don't want to be that teacher.

I'm also about 80 percent sure that I do not want to work for DCFS as a social worker. I get anxiety just thinking about knocking on someone's door with the purpose of investigating child abuse or neglect. I know it's a vital, necessary job. I'm so glad I'm not the one who has to do it. I will be though, when I do my internship, so I suppose we'll find out if I'm cut out for it. Maybe I'll love it.