Blog Post #7: Identity

When asked to pick words that I identify with myself, I chose woman, student, czech, and friend. All of these words describe me and I am proud to identify with them. First of all, I enjoy embracing my femininity. I am proud to be a woman even though I do realize that there are still many ways that women are treated unequally to men. I enjoy presenting myself as a strong woman and proving to others that women are not inferior to men. While at times I think that women feel the need to step up and represent the strengths of all other women, I think it is important to help all women to realize they can achieve all of their goals despite what men say. I am proud to be a woman and I acknowledge how lucky I am to live in a time when women are very close to being respected on the same level as men. Another word that I identify with is Czech. I was born into a 100% Czech family and I have been raised to embrace my heritage. I am a member of multiple Czech heritage based organizations that allow me to stay close to my heritage. I have often thought about what my life would be like if I was not Czech or at least if I wasn't so in touch with my heritage and a member of these groups. I have come to the conclusion that without the Czech influence in my life there is no way I would be where I am right now. My heritage makes up such a large part of my life that I could honestly not even imagine what my 18 years thus far would look like without it. My strong bond with my heritage allows me to proudly identify myself as 100% Czech and to continue identifying myself as this for the rest of my life. While being czech is something that I will always identify with, the word student which I also identify with will not always hold true. I am currently a student and have been for as long as I can remember but this will not always be the case. I have only ever known a life with school present in it and this should be the case for my future as well because I plan to be a teacher. The difference in my future though will be that I will hold a different role in education. Currently, my profession is learning and growing. I spend a majority of my time either in class or studying. Even when I am not doing these things, I am still labeled as a student because I live on a college campus. This identity will change for me in the future but I find it ironic to think that it will switch to the opposing role. Lastly, I identify myself as a friend. I think it is very important for me to always act as the best friend I can be to those close to me. I genuinely enjoy the company of all of my friends and I believe it is important to recognize these strong relationships often. I can never let myself forget that I am a friend to many people and they are also friends to me, so we need to feed off of each other and maintain our relationships. After my own analysis of identity I realize that the way I identify myself is probably much different from those around me. While I'm sure there are many people who have common identifications as me, no two people have the exact same identity. All of us have traits that come together to make a unique person. It is important to acknowledge these differences in identity when entering the world of education. As a teacher in the future I plan to take time to learn about the identities of all of my students and to put an emphasis on the similarities and differences of everyones identities and to treat all students as unique individuals.