In my family, educating children is the most important thing anyone can do. I have four parents who are teachers, either active or retired. My maternal grandparents were both teachers. My sister and I are teachers. Emily worked as a buyer in a department store in New York City and in Los Angeles for years. She worked hard and earned a terrific salary. She also had no vacations or weekends off and she worked twelve hours a day in a job that, she says, "did not contribute in any way to the good of human beings anywhere." Four years ago, Emily decided to change careers and become a middle school teacher. She teaches English as a second language in East Los Angeles.

When I graduated from college, I did not know what I wanted to do with my life. I toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer, but I realized that was because most of my college friends were going to law school. I got a job at Doubleday Publishing Company, but I hated it. I love books. Doubleday thought of books as a business. Doubleday and I didn't get along.

I soon discovered that I wanted to be a teacher. I took a Sign Language course in college for fun. I have always been good at learning languages. I speak French fairly well. When I began to learn Sign Language, I found that I enjoyed signing and I was quite good at it. After being out of college for three years, I decided to go back to school and get a degree in teaching the Deaf. Now I am a teacher. I am skilled at doing many things and I enjoy doing them, but I am an excellent teacher. I adore middle school and high school children and, when I teach them, they know it. I have an amazing amount of patience and the ability to listen to and do more than two things at a time something required for a middle school teacher. I am flexible and can easily adapt to the four thousand changes a minute that happen in a classroom. And I love teaching. I love to explain and discuss the Constitution. I love it when my students bring me articles from the newspaper and then we can discuss how the events described violate someone's constitutional rights. I am thrilled at the end of a school year, when I can look at a student's English writing folder and see the progress and improvement she has made over the course of a school year. I love listening to teenagers tell me the important, exciting, heartbreaking, mundane details of their lives. Each day when I go to work, I am excited to see my students. When I say that I teach middle school, sometimes people will noticeably back away from me. They think that I must be crazy. Of course teenagers can be difficult; but, mostly, they're funny.