I wouldn't be the person that I am, I wouldn't be as passionate about education,
I wouldn't be as passionate as I am about service and public service
if it had not been for my experiences at State,
my positive and my negative experiences.
I am thankful for my negative experiences at State
because they have informed me as to who I am and how I react to different situations.
They have informed me about how people can be. I'm not saying I was naive when I came in and thought everybody was good, but I
really did have a perception that everybody was working for the greater good-quote, unquote-
and I learned that not everybody's working for the greater good unless the greater good is the greater good for themselves,
so I learned the hard lessons that way.
I also learned that you can build lifelong friendships, you can build things that you call brotherhood,
you can build connections with people that you might never have met before,
and State is the only school in the system,
having visited other schools and been around through the Association of Student Governments,
having been around just traveling in that sense,
NC State is the only school in the system, in my experience,
where you really get a diverse group of people together
and have them interact with each other without having a ton of conflict.
There's a lot of underlying issues at State when it comes to
race and all different types of issues that need to be addressed by the administration, they need to be addressed by the school,
but for the most part I've met people from various different backgrounds
that I never would have thought that I could call a friend of mine,
being from Wilmington.
Now I call them friends, and I'm able to interact with those types of people now on a daily basis at school.
Teaching is all about the people that come in your classroom.
You have students that come in from various different backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses.
They might have a different opinion on something from somebody else that might be radically different.
Some of them might be really religious, some of them not. All types of things come into your classroom
and as a teacher you have to know how to be able to deal with each one of those students as individuals.
You can't treat them-. One of my colleagues one time said something to me that was terrible.
She said that you have to kind of look at students as numbers, as kind of like meat puppets,
and I thought about that and I said, no, that's not the case.
I can come up here and put the information on the board and if they get it they get it and if they don't they don't,
and I can still have my job and come home every day and relax and not worry about anything,
but if I cannot connect with those students or try to connect with those students, each and every one of them individually,
then I've failed as a teacher. That's what you're supposed to do.
The only school in this system that can prepare you for that on
a level in which you really get diversity is NC State.