My memorable learning experience...

As a child, if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would not have said a professor. I always had the ambition to become a carpenter and architect. My goal was to create the blueprints AND build the house. Even though my mother has been a teacher as long as I can remember, it never occurred to me as a possible career. So how did I get here? Well, as I discovered computers I decided to shift my career focus towards computers, but it still wasn't teaching computers. It wasn't until 2001 that teaching became a possibility in my mind. I was taking a Microsoft class that I found very interesting. One day, the instructor was verbally quizzing me and my fellow students about the reading assignment from the previous night. The rest of the class fell silent, I seemed to be the only answering the questions because apparently I was the only one that read my overnight assignment. After the instructor chastised the rest of the class for not doing their assignment, he sarcastically asked, "Since you seem to the only person to have read the chapter last night, do you want teach these idiots what they missed?" I agreed. For the next hour, I talked about the concepts and terms from that overnight assignment. I didn't feel like I was being put on the spot. I felt that I was able to talk about a subject that I found very exciting and hopeful foster excitement in the other students. Looking back, I feel that if I hadn't attended that class on that very night, I may have never had that learning experience, caught the teaching bug, and never loved a job as much as I do this one.