Shari

Tell us why you became a teacher

Apparently teaching was somatic for me…it was in my bones. When I was way too young to have career aspirations, I gathered a glorious nub of chalk, a red pen on a string around my neck, a blackboard, a clipboard, treasures from my back yard, and I got to work. I had a roster of imaginary science students. I wish I could say there was a lightning strike when I knew, but it felt ancestral. Teaching was the most natural, predestined, exhilarating posture for me. I stepped into my power!

Tell us about your most memorable teaching experience

My very first teaching job locked me in for life. I had a principal with a teacher spirit, who oversaw a rare K through 12 school in the South. He said yes to all four corners of the imagination. Somehow I talked him into letting me bring my environmental students to a field near the school. I got my commercial drivers license to transport the kids! We set up research plots and had longleaf pine sapling planting days. One of my students wrote about it in the paper. I was hooked.

What would you do with the $25,000?

Besides my own small locus of control in family and community, I want to reach the far reaches of the world if only just to experience each place’s uniqueness. I would travel to become enriched, to put myself outside of myself; to experience all the angles, all the perspectives, all the wonders, all the continents. That’s all I’ve ever wanted…not the item; the experience.