Finding Her Passion

High school students are asked from the minute they walk in the door, “What do you want to be when you get out of high school?” and “Where do you see yourself in five years?”. It’s on the brain their entire time in high school. When she was in high school, AP Computer Science teacher, Mrs. Leaming wasn’t entirely sure about what she wanted to do, but she definitely knew what she didn’t want. “I was a horrible student in high school. I hated it. I loved writing and reading, music and art especially were like my big things when I was in school. I thought anything else was stupid. So once I graduated high school, I still really had no idea what I wanted to do and I went to community college to figure it out.”

During her time in community college, Leaming got to try out all kinds of classes and experiences in fields that she was actually interested in. She mentioned “I was just taking as many classes as I could and I really enjoyed the experience of learning. When I was at Fullerton College, I think I really came into my own as a student.” In all honesty, it was never the learning that she disliked. Leaming stated, “I always really liked learning and I’ve always had that natural curiosity for learning, but I didn’t care for the social aspect of high school, I was never into it.”

When discussing how she got into teaching, Leaming expressed that she didn’t always know she wanted to teach. She explained that being a high school teacher was far from her mind in terms of career choice. While at Fullerton she “took some Anthropology classes, got super excited about that and so when I transferred to Cal State Long Beach, I went to be an Anthropology major and I also wanted to do film. At the time when I was finishing up my bachelor’s degree, I really wanted to make documentaries.” However, her dream of film would eventually receive a reality check. Leaming said that, “At the time, I was living with my husband and he, being the reasonable one of the two of us, was kind of questioning how film would eventually help pay the bills down the road.”

At this point in her life, her dreams of film having been thrown out, “I had this Anthropology degree that I didn’t know what I was going to do with” and that was when her husband offered up teaching as a possibility. As someone who has made her disdain for high school quite clear, Leaming mentioned that, “I didn’t really get how he saw me as a teacher because he knew that I didn’t like high school, and that I never would’ve done elementary or middle school so high school would be my only real teaching option.” However, she decided to give it a chance and upon giving it some real thought, “I subbed for a while and I realized that it was pretty cool. So after that, I went back to school for my teaching credential to teach history. And that’s basically how I ended up here, twenty-something years later.”