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To Teach


 

Author's Note: This is going to be about how I got into teaching as a 3rd generation teacher. I guess I was fighting being a teacher, but my experiences outside of teaching led me to the fact that teaching was always going to be the choice. I have not regretted the acceptance of my role in the 30 plus years that Iʻve been doing this.


 At 17, I was a pig hunter for the Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park.

Well, actually, I was a pig trapper, pig radio collar "hunter," bait girl, pig mama.

I did not accompany the hunters and scientists with a gun, knife, rope.

Just me and my green rubber boots, Leviʻs 501 button downs,

and my favorite purple and pink Izod shirt. 

On the day that one of my snares caught and killed a pig,

my title changed to forensic science assistant.

At 17, the title made me important enough to drive the official national park F150,

pick up the police forensics guy at Kilauea Military camp at 7 am,

open the evacuation locks, trek him through the rain forest on a 3 mile hike

to the "body farm." It was my first fascination with dead bodies, 

the smell of life breaking down and new life blooming.

At 18, not wanting to continue wearing stiff, slightly wet jeans

I informed my college counselor that I was going to medical school to do autopsies.

It really was the fascination of discovery,

the clean cut from the scalpel

the bone dust fragments flying through the air,

the way the lab smelled both astringent and familiar after four hour labs

the familiar heft of intestines, the delicacy of a pancreas. 

But when I rode home on public transportation, my clothes, my hair, my skin

reeking of a formaldehyde that I could no longer smell, 

I became like the homeless addict relegated to the back corner of the bus

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