Meghan Santos

Teaching Statement

I first discovered I wanted to be a teacher my freshman year of

college. In my English 1010 class we were studying the work of

Jonathan Kozol, an education reformer. His views on segregation within

the school system as well as the crisis of illiteracy are what struck me

most. When I was that age, I really felt like I did not have a direction in

my life. Reading his work extracted from me something that was there

all along, but that I had never really acknowledged before my passion

to become an educator. After being introduced to the books of Kozol,

specifically Savage Inequalites, Illiterate America, and Letters to a

Young Teacher, I began to hunger more and more to learn about the

place of education in the lives of our young people. However, I never

saw my future laid about before me so clearly until I started student

teaching. Regardless of how hard, stressful, and time consuming this

profession is, having the honor of teaching my students is the favorite

part of my day. This is what I want.

It almost seems like an impossible task to express in a

statement how I view education and what my goals as a teacher are.

I feel like I am trying to take the universe that is my mind, because this

is the most important thing to me, and condense it into these words

that could never do it justice. But, I guess thats what teaching

literature is all about, helping students to understand their own unique

forms of expression. Well, writers like Toni Morrison and Junot Diaz are

my main inspirations and reasons for falling in love with literature. Both

of those writers relate profoundly to why I believe studying explicit

content is necessary in the classroom. The classroom should be a

place where the reality of students lives are addressed. Therefore, I

believe that literature such as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

and The Bluest Eye are pivotal texts. The former because of how it

deals with what it means to be an immigrant in New York City in all its

rawness and richness, rife with struggle and pain but also triumph and

hope. The latter because of how it addresses the reality of being a

young African American woman subject to a beauty standard that

psychologically damages you. If we are not, as teachers, addressing

the physical and emotional realities of the lives of our students through

the literature we teach them, then we are doing them a disservice.

Another goal of mine is to constantly challenge students to

reflect on how the literature speaks to intrinsic truths about the human

experience, i.e. How is this relevant to the world I live in? I do this in

my classroom by trying to stay as up to date as possible on current

events. I am a firm believer that students should have the opportunity

to discuss and question what is happening in their own lives, as well as

what is happening in both our local and global community. I do not

know of a better tool for engagement or identifying purpose and

motivation to grapple with a text. I believe that if one does not

question and make important correlations between what is written in a

novel and what is happening within a society, that individual is not

reading. Therefore, I find it necessary to teach literacy in this manner:

appreciating literature for the art form that it is, but also understanding

that it makes us question and analyze the realities of our lives.

I walk into every class I teach with the same goal, regardless of

the subject matter, and that is to elicit the belief within students that

they have the power to impact change, and to create the life of their

own choosing. With the combination of advanced literacy and self-

determination skills, I hope for and I work hard for this purpose: that

students will be able to advocate for themselves. Every lesson I create

is geared towards that singular idea. Is this material making them

challenge, criticize, analyze, and express their innermost truth? I see

no better way to accomplish this than educating young people on the

subject of literature. I thank God that I have found my path, and that it

is a path that gives my life such a profound meaning. Quite simply, I

want to help kids, I want them to believe in themselves. I mean this

genuinely, I believe in all my students. That is my number 1 strength

as a teacher, I believe in each of them, and because of that I push

them to believe in themselves. I do not indoctrinate them, or sell them

a dream; I simply hold a mirror up to each and every one of them.