On Ambition & Reimagining Education

I spent a good chunk of this year having conversations around ambition and reflecting on my relationship to my own ambitions. That dance between contentment and ambition is one I’m trying to figure out, but I know I can’t figure it out in my head.

After leaving my public school job, that time away from any job helped me see that I could be okay despite the expected anxiety and stress around health insurance and a lack of consistent income. Now I know I can ride those emotional waves, be completely illegible to others, and that big changes won’t kill me. I needed that evidence.

But, equally important, that period of time allowed me to divorce myself from my experience working in education. I wanted and needed to kill off that part of my identity. I didn’t even want to write anything about my time working in schools. And I completely undervalued my own skills I developed during that period of my life. My tension with education at the institutional level was too high, and because it always felt like I was too powerless to ever make the kind of impact I wanted to make, it made sense to not look back, and allow myself the space to reimagine what my future could look like.

Lately, I’ve been revisiting my relationship to the education system. I’ve been thinking about the misalignment I felt and feel, but also, I’ve been revisiting that desire I always had for change, to challenge the system, to reimagine what education can look like. In feeling powerless, I don’t think I ever really allowed myself the chance to dream to the extent that I wanted to. I don’t think I let myself have ambition as big as it could be. And in general, I don’t think I fully believed I could ever make a big impact. I felt limited by projected impossibility.

But, being away from the classroom, I think, helped me think a little more expansively about education and teaching and what that can look like beyond traditional schooling. I don’t know what that really means, though. And I don’t know what role I want to play in the education realm, or what that could or would ever look like. But, I know making a positive and meaningful impact is still important to me. And I know I haven’t stopped caring about education. But, there is still so much I can’t see. Perhaps, these are dots meant to be connected eventually by a future me.

And maybe what I’m sensing is that impact in any realm, at the institutional, cultural, or societal level, is actually much more possible than I ever thought it could be. Even if that impact is tiny, it can still be meaningful enough to create ripples. I can feel that understanding growing inside me. And I can feel myself tapping back into that pull to make tiny ripples, like I had when I was younger, when I could dream endlessly without the pain of implausibility. And so, lately, I find myself dreaming a bit more about how much bigger my ambitions can be.

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Leave me feedback, thoughts, questions, whatever, etc.

These daily posts aren’t polished essays, but an experiment in taking one thing that’s lingering with me and publicly executing on trying to develop and articulate my thinking about it, especially when my thoughts are incomplete.

I think of everything on my entire Substack as something I can come back to and iterate & expand on later, including these posts! So, if anyone leaves a comment that sparks anything for me, I’ll consider exploring it further sometime. Here’s a link to a Google doc. of the above post:

→ Right Here!!←

If you have any specific thoughts that came up for you while reading, feel free to just jump in the doc. and leave comments on those moments, or all over throughout; leave thoughts on whatever you want, and ask questions, or share reactions to specific things. What stands out? What are you curious to know more about?

— Sandra