Hi everybody, my names Charlie Sebastian. I grew up in Montmartre Saskatchewan, a small town about an hour away from Regina. Growing up, my I never thought I’d end up teaching. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. My town was full of farmers. Just about every guy in my class grew up in a farm, and they knew from a young age that they wanted to keep their family farms going. I didn’t have anything like that. Both of my parents family’s were farming families. My parents decided against that. They decided to buy a restaurant/bar in their hometown. My mom and dad ran the restaurant for years, long enough that by the time I was 10 I was thinking that I might one day want to run the place. But as I got a bit older I realized how hard it was on them. When I was about 12, they finally decided to sell the place, and I understood why. It was a hard industry to be in, especially in a small town where most of your staff was high schoolers. When they finally sold the place, I had kind of realized that I didn’t really want the life they while they owned the place. However, I still worked in the industry. My first job was as a fry cook at the local rink, and I then moved over to waiting tables at the other restaurant in town. I enjoyed working in the field and saw that it was something I could see myself doing for a long time, but I always knew I wanted to do more. But what?
Growing up, I was that one kid in your English class who always wrote too much when the teacher asked for a short story. This was probably due to me reading a lot when I was young, always wanting to create my own story and characters that could rival the ones I read. When a teacher told me I had to keep it to 5 pages, I would have to compress everything I was mad about having to compress everything when my classmates groaned that they had to stretch their own stuff out. The other thing I grew to love was art, specifically animation. I grew up on Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks. I had loved drawing, I spent hours drawing when I was younger, and even went so far as to try to learn how to animate, both through online tutorials and by buying books by animators. However, I soon realized that (at least in the case of animation), I just didn’t have the skills for it. I gave up animation, while writing slowly died out for me. However, English and art both remained some of my favorite classes, as well as math.
I found myself wondering why I enjoyed those classes so far, how I had realized writing and animation weren’t things I truly wanted in my life, why did I still love working in these classes? And how did math sneak up on me? As I went on, I started helping my classmates in class, giving advice on their writing, helping them with math concepts. My younger siblings also started asking for help with their homework, and I really enjoyed helping them learn. It finally clicked for me when a friend of mine said “you’d make a good teacher”. I kind of realized in that moment why I liked the classes I liked, it was because of the teachers. My English, math, and art teachers had kind of inspired me. I enjoyed the classes so much because I liked how they taught, and I realized I could see myself doing what they did in the future. And when I started tutoring this summer, it cemented the fact.
I should say, I have absolutely 0 experience when it comes to blogging, as well as any educational technology. Other than zoom, if that counts. I’ve never seen myself running a blog, but after writing this post, I’m actually kind of exited to continue with it. Being able to share my story, and my future journeys in this class and beyond, could be interesting. I’ve never really read peoples blogs, but I have seen people online through snapchat, Instagram, even Facebook, sharing their stories and their journeys through life. I’ve always wondered how or why people did that as I’ve never been one to catalogue my own life, let alone share it with others. However, doing this so far has been kinda fun, and I’m having fun thinking about where this will go.