The Rebellious Young Working Man

 I still lived at home with my parents and they remained loving as ever. However it's obvious now that my life seemed to have gone off track. This wasn't the future I had envisioned for myself as a boy. I was working with former convicts and druggies in the rain. Nature, which I had always admired on family hikes, was now an omnipresent force in my life. The wetness now permeated my soul. I'd leave for work at 7AM, arrive and have to listen to my workmates talk about the affairs they were having, the drugs they were doing, the scams that they were pulling and ever was my rain gear dripping with rainwater. 

That year a workmate, put a book in my hands. It wasn't the Bible or a self help book. It was a novel. It was Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. It was a book about a guy going crazy. The subject was relevant because after all, half the guys I worked with seemed to be crazy and I felt that if I stayed there long enough I would end up like them. Something else about the book stood out to me. The way it was written. It was humorous. The sentences were short yet packed full of ideas that woke something in my spirit. I wanted to read more books like this. I wanted to learn to write like this man, to fall into stories where each day wasn't the same until I was bent and used up like my workmates. 

My two years stent as a rebellious and lost adolescent in the adult work force was coming to an end. I wanted to go to school. I didn't have to. I wanted to. I quit my job in the rain and enrolled at the community college. I was twenty years old. 

Undergrad

The change in environments couldn't have been more extreme. To go from an unskilled job working with men that seemed to be very immature even to a twenty year old, to an institute of higher learning where ivy grew on Old Main. It was as if I had stepped into some elvish fantasy to the house of fire, where poets and scientists were revered.

But the university has it's pit falls too. Students are young and idealistic and everything is a new experience away from family. I studied art in the art department for two years. I was going to be an artist because my brother and father were and I hadn't exactly figured out what I wanted to do with my life. I felt that the art department was mostly self centered and egotistical. A lot of ordinary kids were now wearing thrift store fashion and slopping paint on canvas and talking about politics over bottles of wine. I withered there. It seemed that I had wasted two years and a lot of money. I switched majors to English and started to feel better. After all, a novel had brought me here to university, fitting I thought that I should now study the great writers and learn to write like them.

I had experienced a lot of the college narrative as well. I had new girl friends, went to parties, sat with friends as they beat their bongo drums protesting the war. There were a lot of distractions.

I graduated in 2006. Eight years of wandering and still no clear idea of what i wanted to do.

Back to Where I started

After thousands of dollars of debt, I was back to where I started. Working for public housing as a maintenance technician. The money was pretty good and for a time I contemplated working until retirement as a maintenance technician. I was thinking about marrying my college girlfriend and saving for a house and car and living like my parents had lived. Why was life so hard for my generation but seemed so easy for their's? They didn't need college degrees and were still able to raise families and buy homes.

When my girlfriend decided to move on to more adventurous pursuits that didn't involve being married to a maintenance man, I freaked. My plans. My life! After some internet surfing, I found myself on a plane with everything I owned in two suitcases on a plane bound for South Korea. What on earth was I doing?

선생님: Teacher Matthew

As my airplane descended into Incheon International Airport in Seoul, South Korea, I looked out of the window and couldn't comprehend what I was seeing. There were gold streaks across a gray-green field of abstract shapes. I thought they were angels. It was my first time on an airplane. It was my first time out of the country and really the first time I was completely alone and unsure of what I was doing. The gold streaks turned out to be the setting sun reflecting off the countless windows far below on the earth.

I was coming to Korea to teach English. I taught for two years in South Korea. There was no teacher training just discoveries day after day. I loved it. More than I had loved anything. I felt for the first time that I was doing something that mattered that would impact other people in a really positive way.

Today 4 years later I still receive letters from some of my former high school students that are now in medical school studying medical text books in English. This was a new identity that gave me a stronger sense of accomplishment and purpose than anything before. Students would see me on the street and say, "Hello, 선생님!"

On-line Teaching

After 2 years teaching in Korea, I came home energized. The job market though was not. I had finally found something I loved, a purpose for my life. In Korea, and in many Asian countries, and perhaps here too once upon a time, to be a teacher is to hold one of the most important and respected jobs in all of society. I wanted to continue to hold that entrusted position but to influence kids in my own community. Kids that were like me. That find it hard to excel because of peer pressure and mediocre teachers like my own sophomore math teacher. How could I continue to teach at home without a state teaching certification? Well I couldn't. But I did end up finding a small teaching company started by a Godly woman whose vision it is to bring education to every corner of the globe.

She flew me to her home in Washington DC and shared her vision with me. Her dream is bigger than anything I have ever imagined but her personality and passion was so magnetic that I joined her company and went back to Korea to help her. I worked from Korea and the US as an online teacher. A rewarding job for sure, one that I have a difficult time explaining to my elderly grandparents. The world is really truly connected and small. And with a press of a button I can connect and positively impact people on the other side of the world. This to me is the most amazing thing that I have discovered so far in my life.

Who I Am. Who I Want To Become.

So how does this chain of events, I call my life form my identity. What parts of it are most important to me. This particular narrative I have threaded about my life for me illustrates that there is a purpose for my life and that though at certain points, this purpose is hidden, that if one plugs along and doesn't give up, you can be anything you want to be.

My father is the product of an alcoholic home. He isn't particularly educated or wealthy. He is just a humble man that turned his life around when a co-worker told him about this man named Jesus Christ. He cleaned up his act, got married, had children, wrote a prayer for me in my baby book. I am my fathers son. He has preached to me for years, the saint that he is, and at times I rejected everything he preached. But no matter how much I push it aside, the love of Jesus manifests itself in my life again. I am my Lord's servant.

I want to reflect again on that random seating chart in 10th grade Geometry class. If I hadn't been seated next to Aaron I wouldn't have been given the job at the Royal Fork Buffet. If I had not gotten the job at the Royal Fork, I wouldn't have met Aaron's friend who got me the job as a landscaper. If I hadn't been a landscaper and seen the hard life of those men working in the field, if my co-worker hadn't put that novel in my hand--if I didn't read that novel and become interested in literature and enroll in school, if I didn't find my way into the English writing program at the university where I met my girlfriend at the time, later to be dumped--if I hadn't wanted to get away, far away to the other side of the world...I wouldn't have become a teacher.

I am a teacher.

What do I want to be that I am not today. I want to be a Godly man, like my father was for me. And one day I will write in my newborn son's baby book:""Lord, let me raise my son to know you. Guide him and let him grow up to be a man of God. Protect him and watch over him."

Ecological Systems Theory

Now Bronfenbrenner might have something to say about random chance or a destiny laid out by God. If I analyze my identity using Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory I can give some context to the elements that are shaping my life. Because again, I am not the only person in existence but one of many in my environment bumping into each other and influenceing one another.

Bronfenbrenner's theory lays out five spheres of influence acting on the individual: 1.  Micro-system 2. Meso System 3. Exo-system 4. Macro-system 5. Chrono-system. In closing, let me take a quick look at how each system works in my life.

Micro-system. My microsystem is composed of all the people I interact with directly: my family, friends, co-workers, Facebook friends, students, grocery store clerks, etc. My biggest support group is my family. My parents, and brother are at the core of who I am. Their opinions and pieces of advice play a big role in the choices I make. Part of me felt I was too old to be at the university again but they encouraged me to come. The older I get the more I am able to control to an extent who I let in or out of my micro-system. As a new born I was helpless to control my micro-system. I was blessed to be born into the family I was born into.

Meso-sytem. My meso-system is comprised of the relationships between the elements of my micro-system. For example when my boss, a huge part of my Micro-system, asked me to go to Korea and I agreed, this impacted my family. In a lot of ways the biggest change in how people go about their lives in the early 21st century is peoples relationship to computer networks and social networking sites. Because my friends, family, and I have had to move around so much, because the nature of my job is such that my coworkers are spread about the world, we use the computer to keep us all linked together.

Exo-System. The Exo-system is something I have less if not no control over. For example, my father is a cable splicer for a cable company--has been for 34 years. Growing up, he would sometimes come home beat down, working with many of the same types of men that I worked with as a landscaper. The men at my fathers work shape him and he in turn shapes me. My mother works for the school district: an environment filled with much more positive people who have a more positive outlook on the world. My mom would come home from work much happier than my father and so my parents jobs influenced us at home.

Macro-system. This is perhaps the most interesting system to me and yet the one furthest from my control. Changing economies, technological breakthroughs, waring ideologies, shifting classes and immigration: these are all players in the Macro-system. When the economy stumbled in 2008, I went to Korea to make money. One thing I have really seen happen in just the last 10 years is the world getting smaller and smaller. This is exciting and yet a little scary at the same time.

Chronosystem. My grandfathers were married before they were 20. They didn't have high school educations. One of my grandfathers helped build the highway systems. My father married when he was 25. He has spent his life connecting wires for cable TV and Internet. I am 31, unmarried, and still in school! My grandfather went to Korea to fight in a war. My father was enlisted in the navy in Vietnam. I spent two years teaching children English in Korea. Times have definitely changed. People are marrying later, having kids later, and staying in school longer.