ABSTRACT
I always admired teachers, but I never wanted to be one. Growing up as a White middle-class child in rural Charleston, WV, I was always an average student. I never did particularly well in school, and I often felt that teachers did not understand me. I was that student. In terms of academics, I was the type of student that flies under the teacher's radar because I was not the lowest achieving student, but not the highest achieving, either. Teachers were never particularly concerned with my progress, but my report cards always had similar comments stating that I was not giving my best effort. For most of my educational career, starting in elementary school and through college, I was a mediocre student, mostly earning B's and a few C's. Although I did have some wonderful teachers, I was never interested in learning and could not find the motivation behind why I was learning all of these concepts. I never fully understood why I was so unenthused about my education until my time in graduate school, followed by my experience teaching with the Talent Development Academies (TDA) project (Swanson et al., 2019).
