The prompt today is: What’s your mission? But that’s not a straightforward question to answer. I wear many hats, so how do I know which mission they are asking about? So I’ll answer for all.
As a mother, my mission is not to raise assholes. Children are only children for such a short time. They will spend a majority of their lives beyond my home and care, making it my duty to raise decent humans. I know it may be a silly concept, but I am not talking about raising people pleasers either. I want my children to know when to be respectful, when to reach out to those in need, and be able to work with others. To know right from wrong, when to seek help or when to problem solve. More importantly, I want them to know when to stand up for themselves and how to leave a dangerous situation.
Parenting is about love and care, and so is teaching. My course is an elective, a choice program that students apply to be a part of. It is considered a career and technical educational course. And for me, it’s so much more than teaching students how to use a camera and edit. I heavily focus my projects on critical thinking and problem solving. I want my students to understand how to research their topics and find credible sources. The aim is to expose the dangers of unquestioning information and to showcase the ease false information can be created. I usually go off script when students are required to engage in the school-wide Mental Health lessons. Most teachers just have the student watch the videos and answer the questions and leave it at that. The students find the lessons to be a waste of time because they include dated examples. However, I speak to the class about my personal life experiences that relate to the lessons. Many students have thanked me because they feel uneasy or need time to process the information after the lessons. After the Techsafe lesson, I have all my students take out their cellphones. I explain to them how metadata works and show them how their pictures create a map of everywhere they have gone. We then go through their settings and turn off different location trackers.
As for being a writer, I don’t have a mission for anyone aside from myself. Writing is therapy. Sometimes I use it to express emotions and negative feelings, and other times to share thoughts I don’t want to keep to myself. I have had thoughts that have been beneficial to others and have found the readers who needed to know they are not alone. However, I don’t market my work or seek attention for what I write. I write for myself, be it my blog, my short stories, or my book. I write because it is a passion, not a mission to make money.