Click-click,
pause...click-click pause...click-click pause...click-click pause.... This sound brings me back to my childhood, to
my grandmother sitting at the kitchen table. The sounds are of my
grandmother rolling the small refrigerated bottle of insulin in between her
hands to mix the life preserving serum. Her first step in the process of
preparing her insulin shot.
At eight years old, she
taught me how to prepare the shot for her. At the time, my major concern was
not the fact that I was handling a sharp needle. My main focus was for the bottle to sound in
my hands the way it sounded in hers. “Click-click, click-click,
pause...click-click pause...click-click pause...click-click pause.... I later found that the sounds were generated
from the glass clicking against her wedding ring and mothers ring. By the
time I was nine, I was adept at preparing the medicine, mixing the serum, drawing
the insulin into the syringe, clearing any possible air bubbles, cleaning the
injection site on her arm, injecting the medicine.
I did this twice a day,
as if it were part of my childhood chores. Perhaps you could say that it was.
In the moments while I was giving my grandma her medicine, there were nuggets
of inspiration. “Michelle, you know you can be a doctor,” she'd say, “actually,
you can be anything you want to be. Go to school. Get as much
schooling as you want. Don't let anyone tell you stop.”
Inspiration is defined
as the stimulation of the mind or emotions. My science education career was
inspired out of the experiences I had with my grandmother and grandfather. With
them, there was never a silly question or missed opportunity. Perhaps it was
because they were passed over by opportunity or because they had many years of
experience having parented ten children of their own. Regardless, they provided
every opportunity for me to develop the curiosity that aids one in becoming a
good scientist, student and educator.
The click-click
pause...takes me back to wondering how the medicine helped my grandmother.
Currently, I have a much more robust understanding of the relationship between
the insulin injections and the effect on the body; however, the advantage view
from my young eyes provided me with the curious questioning and opportunity to
develop one of many scientific reasoning skills for which my grandparents laid
the foundation.
In addition to the
inspiration provided by my grandparents, my early teachers also had a
significant impact on the teacher I have become. These teachers perpetually met
me where I was and provided greater challenges rather than allowing any
complacency. This trait infiltrates my teaching and what I aspire to inspire in
my students. In short, my primary inspiration for my career in education is
“the click-click pause of a glass bottle rolling through the hands of an
elderly woman.” I aspire to inspire just as much as the woman who inspired me
to explore a world that she did not have the opportunity to see for herself.
