“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Did anyone ever ask you that question?
I asked it to myself in my middle years as an English Major at UNC Chapel Hill.
“I want to be an inner-city teacher and a writer,” I answered.
That’s what I’ve become.
(Or maybe it’s better to say that’s what I’m becoming, because both of those vocations are more journeys than destinations.)
My second choice was to be a doctor.
I wanted to be a pediatrician.
I wanted to help the world by healing broken arms or asthmatic lungs or leukemia or any and all of the diseases of childhood.
Sometimes, I still do.
So it made my heart smile when one of my students, Ariana, asked, “Mr. Barton, can Natalia and I use our Chromebooks during indoor recess today to search for a cure for cancer?”
“I’m going to be a researcher,” said Natalia. “And Ariana is going to be a surgeon.”
“Yep,” said Ariana. “We’re planning on working together.”
I stopped and let that smile rise to my face and to my eyes.
I looked at these two nine year old girls in my 4th grade classroom in my Title I school in one of the poorer parts of my city with deep compassion and wide wonder.
“Wow,” I said. (That is one of my favorite words, you know.) “Natalia, you can discover the cure in your lab. Ariana, you can take that cure to the people. I just want you to know how thankful I am for you and how lucky I am to be your teacher.”
They gave me the same smiles you can see in their picture below.
And as I sit and write in my inner-city classroom on this ordinary Tuesday afternoon, I realize...
I am becoming a doctor.
Through them.
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