I Want To Earn a BA in Education But I’m Not Sure I’m Cut Out For It – What I Learned Shadowing A First Grade Class
8:17 AM on a rainy Tuesday, I’m leaning against the painted cinder block cubby wall in my sister’s first grade classroom, holding a printed copy of the local university’s BA in education program brochure, when seven-year-old Milo lurches forward and hurls half a blueberry muffin and a full carton of chocolate milk all over my new white canvas sneakers. I freeze. My hands go clammy. I’ve spent six months panicking over whether I’m actually cut out for this, and now this feels like some kind of sign. My sister, who’s taught here for 12 years, just tosses me a stack of paper towels from her desk and yells over the hum of kids arguing over glitter glue, “Wipe the worst of it. It’ll leave a cool story, not a permanent stain.” Then she turns back to helping a kid re-tie his sparkly sneakers that he’d untied just to get attention.
I’ve worked front desk admin at a local dental office for four years, and I’ve wanted to switch to elementary education for just as long. Every time I start the application, I hit that wall: I am planning to do a BA in education but… I don’t have kids of my own. I leave the grocery store early when the after-work crowd gets too loud because the noise makes my head throb. I saw a reel last month of a teacher crying in their car after parent-teacher conferences, and I laid awake that night thinking that would be me three months into my first job. My sister finally told me to stop overthinking it and come shadow her class for a week before I turned in my app. “You’re scared of the stuff they don’t put on the program website,” she said. “Go see it for yourself.”
The first three days were a mess of unplanned things I never would have predicted. Tuesday after the muffin incident, we got to art centers, and two boys decided to draw permanent marker mustaches on each other’s cheeks while I was passing out construction paper. I was already halfway across the room, my heart rate up, ready to tell them how bad that was, when my sister waved me off. She walked over, tilted her head, and said, “Wow, that’s the most impressive mustache I’ve seen all week. After centers, we’ll scrub it with hand sanitizer. If it doesn’t come all the way off, you two get to be our class pirates for reading time tomorrow.” Both boys grinned, no one acted out again that day, and I stood there surprised. I’d have turned that tiny prank into a 20-minute lecture about rules and respect, turned two silly kids into upset kids, and made everyone late for math.
Wednesday, during reading groups, a little girl named Lila hid behind the bean bag and refused to read out loud to her group. She’d stumbled over the word “caterpillar” the week before, a couple kids had laughed, and she hadn’t volunteered to read since. I remembered my sister saying that pushing her to do it anyway just makes it worse, so I just sat down next to her on the floor, pulled out my program brochure again, and didn’t say anything. Five minutes later, she tapped my arm with her picture book about golden retrievers and asked if I’d listen to her read just to me. She stumbled over three words, and I just waited, didn’t jump in to correct her before she could try again. When she finished the whole book, she grinned and ran over to show my sister. That night, I drove home, and my sneakers still smelled like blueberry and chocolate, but I felt lighter than I had in months.
What I realized this week is that my “but” wasn’t about whether I could pass the college classes or write lesson plans. It was about the unwritten stuff no one tells you before you sign up for a BA in education, and it’s the same stuff parents deal with every day at home with their own kids. I always thought you had to be the perfect, calm adult who never gets flustered, who fixes every problem immediately, who knows every answer. But that’s not what works.
The first thing I learned that I already started using when I babysit my niece is that you don’t have to solve every problem right this second. For a prank, for a mess, for a kid who’s acting out to get attention, turning down the volume on your reaction takes away the thing they wanted in the first place. If my niece draws on my notebook with crayon now, I don’t yell. I just say “that’s a pretty drawing. We’ll get a wet wipe when you’re done.” Half the time, that’s all it takes, no fight, no hurt feelings.
The second thing is that you don’t have to know everything to be good with kids. When a kid asked me how clouds hold water that day, I told him I couldn’t remember exactly how it works, and asked if he wanted to look it up on the class tablet after snack. He thought that was way more fun than me just telling him the answer. My sister said she does this all the time – if she doesn’t know an answer, she says so, and looks it up together. Kids don’t judge you because you don’t know something. They just get to learn that no one knows everything, which is a good lesson on its own.
I still haven’t hit send on my application yet. The “but” isn’t totally gone. Last Friday, we had a lockdown drill, and we all crammed into the back closet by the bathroom, and I was so stressed my hands were shaking the whole 10 minutes. A third of the kids were whispering, and I could feel my headache coming on, and I thought “am I really cut out for this?” Then a little boy named Javi noticed my hands were shaking, and he squeezed my hand and didn’t let go until the drill was over.
I still think about that when I look at the faint blue stain on my sneakers, sitting by my computer where the application tab is open. I don’t know if I’ll be the perfect teacher. I know I’ll have days where I cry in my car after school, just like that TikTok I saw. But I also know that the messy parts aren’t the parts that make you bad at this. They’re just the parts that come with the job. I’ll probably hit send on the application this weekend. We’ll see what happens after that.
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