If you asked me what I wanted to be when I was 15, I would have told you without hesitation, “A journalist.” And if you asked me what I definitely did not want to be, I would have said, equally fast, “I know I don’t want to be a teacher.”

To meet my singular career goal, I did everything an aspiring news writer should do. I wrote for my high school paper and later got accepted onto the staff of The Argonaut, the official newspaper of the University of Idaho. I also worked at the school radio station, KUOI 89.3, where I managed the library and hosted shows. I studied how to make a news broadcast and even produced a one-time-only episode of my own live, one-hour comedy show, Wednesday Night Live.

I was on my way.

And then everything crashed and burned. I took my first job as a serious, news writing lady, only to discover that journalists have a unique skill set that I never developed. Good journalists worked in a highly structured, intensely organized way while I floundered through random notes and had a hard time remembering who called when with a tip or a quote. I wasn’t organized, my skin was too thin and I took all the angry phone calls and furious letters to the paper’s editor about my latest article personally. I struggled to get my pieces done and to keep my anxiety down.

In short, I found myself in a job I hated and that hated me back, but it was also the career I’d worked so hard to enter. The situation depressed me so deeply I quit in a flood of tears while my boss stared at me with an exasperated look on her face. I hated my life and myself.

A failed journalist at 24, I started looking for something else.

Reason 1: I had zero desire

Both my parents assured me I did not want to teach. And I paid attention. After all, they were both educators.

Mom worked in elementary education back in what I consider the golden days of teaching, the 1970s. She entered a goldenrod and forest green classroom as a bright-eyed student-teacher and found herself welcomed and encouraged by everyone. Her principal loved her and mentored her through her early teaching years. She adored her students and they thought she hung the moon.

I remember going to the grocery store or the public library with her and watching as Mom’s former students came up to her and asked shyly, “Mrs. Redifer? Is that you?” And then they’d have a quick catch-up, Mom asking, “Did you marry so-and-so?” or “I hope you got into that engineering program!”

Despite her sunny memories and swaths of fans, Mom didn’t want me to be a teacher.

She told me that because she saw those days in education; a time when teachers made a decent wage, had membership in teacher’s unions that protected them, and the idea of for-profit education seemed insane. But, as her career stretched into the 1980s and 90s, all of that fell apart. She retired in a broken school district that couldn’t pay her what she was owed thanks to massive embezzlement committed by workers in the superintendent’s office. She left a system that felt alien to her and she couldn’t walk away fast enough.

“Whatever you do,” she told me, “don’t be a teacher.”

My dad had the same attitude, but for different reasons. He never really wanted to teach. As a boy, he dreamt of being an architect. But, when he mentioned that dream to a teacher, he got his hopes dashed.

“You can’t be an architect. You’re so bad at math!” she told him. This was back in the 1960s when teachers felt free to let students bully one another and often joined in on the fun. I’m sure that teacher had no qualms telling my father he should stop dreaming. Maybe all she meant to do was make him study a little harder, but she broke his heart that day.

Dad never studied architecture, he went to a teacher’s college. Unlike Mom, he wasn’t loved and fawned over as an educator. Instead, he struggled to find the line between himself and his students, all while desperately trying to stay in the closet, hiding from his wide-eyed charges and his wife. It didn’t last long — soon his students picked up on what he was so scared to admit about himself and the rumors started. Once word got out Dad was a homosexual, it became impossible for him to get a teaching job anywhere.

He tried everything else — selling cars, selling houses, working day jobs at different stores, but nothing took. He eventually landed a job as a prison guard where he was asked to teach classes once again. He found he loved working with incarcerated adults and in prison, no one cared about his personal life.

But Dad implored me, “Don’t be a teacher.”

Reason 2: I was desperate

I felt so lost in the job market that for a while I tried out unemployment. This was 2004; George W. Bush was in the White House, the economy wasn’t great, and suddenly everyone was all about the internet. I’d used it in my college classes, but I never thought it would be a part of my professional life. So, I didn’t learn much about it.

After graduating from a mostly analog school, I found myself in a digital world. I had undiagnosed depression and no prospects. I hung out with friends, watched too much TV, gained a bunch of weight, and wondered where the hell I’d gone wrong.

A friend of mine pulled me aside one night at a party. “Lindsay,” he told me, “I’m worried about you. What are you going to do?”

I shrugged. I genuinely had no idea.

“You know, I just signed up for Peace Corps. You should look into it.” He went on to explain what exactly Peace Corps was, how it worked, and how they were sending him to Kazhakstan for two years to teach advanced math. I was intrigued, but I didn’t think too much of it. After all, I wasn’t looking to be a teacher.

But then, it happened again. A different friend and I had almost the same conversation. She completed two years of Peace Corps in Francophone Africa and encouraged me to talk to a recruiter. She said this with no inkling that someone else already told me the same thing. It gave me chills.

Within a few days, I was on the phone with a recruiter.

“If you were to get placed in a country, what part of the world would be attractive to you?” she asked me.

I didn’t hesitate. That second advisor, the one who’d already done Peace Corps and come back, had made me swear I’d only ask for one continent.

“Africa,” I told my recruiter. She said, “Great! That will fast-track you for placement. Oh, by the way,” she added, “we love journalists in Peace Corps. You guys make wonderful teachers.” She suggested I find a school where I could do some volunteering to get a feel for the classroom and also highly recommended that I avoid any serious romantic relationships before shipping out.

It never occurred to me to ask if I could do something besides teach. I just hung up and got started down the one career path I’d sworn off for years.

After all, this wasn’t some public school gig, it was teaching abroad. Totally different.

Reason 3: I had no idea what I was getting into

It took almost a year and a mountain of paperwork, but I eventually left Idaho for Philadelphia where I met my fellow Peace Corps recruits. We were all headed to the same place to do the same job — we’d be English teachers spread out across Madagascar.

I went to that first training in the states giddy with anticipation. I had a purpose! I was about to meet new friends! I was no longer unemployed! It felt like a dream.

Oh, and also I needed to teach, but I felt certain that would be no problem. After all, I volunteered two nights a week at an English as a Second Language class for adults. I knew what I was doing.

As a group, we traveled to Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar. There, we got on a tiny bus and drove through the city to a big house owned by Peace Corps where we’d stay a few days.

I’ll never forget that drive. The smell of charcoal, smoke, and hard, sweaty bodies made me choke. I sat in a tilted, broken seat and stared at the city so packed full of houses, cars, motorcycles, and people I couldn’t figure out how anyone moved. The women in the street stood unnaturally straight as they balanced massive bags of rice on their heads, each with a baby tied to her back and at least one more kid holding her hand as she speed-walked through traffic.

My eyes landed on a tiny old woman struggling to cross the packed street. She stood about 3 foot 2 and walked with a cane, dressed head to toe in white, (I later learned this meant she was a widow), and stepping on gnarled feet while she scowled at the loud, insistent minivans packed full of passengers that seemed refused to brake for her. She darted past each with unnatural speed and made it to the other side while I held my breath.

I watched this incredibly tough, tiny person and realized how soft and big and pale I was in the same place. All around me were young graduates who weren’t failed journalists, who didn’t come from a tiny town in Idaho, and who all seemed confident they knew what they were doing.

I looked at them and thought, “I’m going to die here,” as our car joined the fray.

Reason 4: My students terrified me

To learn how to teach, I got one month of training.

One month.

I felt so certain that running a classroom was easy, that I would fall into my role naturally, that I didn’t bother looking through the lesson plan book Peace Corps gave me. I also failed to read the organization’s book about classroom management or talk with my fellow trainees, many of whom had actual experience, about how to start the year, how to get a class’ attention, nothing.

Instead, I sampled the local beer, learned how to cook with fresh garbanzo beans and the local greens, hung out with other trainees, and avoided any talk about the job we were all about to start. I figured teaching was hanging out with kids, writing on a blackboard, and reading in my free time. Simple. Besides, this was Peace Corps. I was in this organization for the experience, my experience. That’s what mattered, right?

When I think back on the person I was at that time, I feel physical pain. That ego-with-legs version of me makes me want to slap myself in the face. If I could, I’d go back in time and scream at myself, “TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY! THIS IS NOT SOME CASUAL DAY JOB! IT’S A HUGE RESPONSIBILITY!”

A writer friend recently mentioned to me that she knows a woman who works as a teacher and really ought to be fired. This friend of a friend says horrible things to her students, cheats them out of a good education, yet remains in her position at the front of the classroom.

“You know,” my writer friend mentioned, “if someone is a bad cashier, it’s no big deal. It doesn’t really affect anyone. But a bad teacher? That person can do real damage.”

Don’t I know it.

As training ended, another trainee I’ll call Diana caught me one day while we swept out our perpetually dusty rooms. She stopped sweeping to tell me, “Lindsay, this job isn’t for everyone. Maybe you should rethink this.”

In true form, I took it personally and stormed off with my twiggy broom. What did she know?

Reason 5: See for yourself

Peace Corps placed me in a town called Maevatanana, a name that translates to Beautiful Place, (it wasn’t), and gave me a house attached to a middle school. There, I would teach classes to sixth graders who were expected to learn English despite living in a country unofficially governed by France and where French was the default language for nearly everything.

The moment the locals saw me, they called me a racial slur, “Vazaha!” i.e. “Whitey!”

They always said it like that, alone and with an exclamation point at the end. They yelled it over and over. “Vazaha! Vazaha! Vazaha!” I knew what it meant, I’d taken some basic Malagasy language classes, but I never thought I’d have to hear it once a minute 24 hours a day.

“Okay, breathe,” I told myself. “It doesn’t matter. Time to be a teacher. You can do this.”

Then my students arrived. They came to school at 6 a.m. on a Monday morning. I heard them before I saw them. They walked up to the building making a dragging sound. They didn’t step so much as slide their feet and all of them wore plastic flip flops as part of their school uniform, so they approached with a shh-shh sound.

More and more students crowded around the school in the dry, empty schoolyard. The dragging sound got louder and louder.

Unable to put it off any longer, I got up, took a bucket shower, and let the brisk, cold water snap me out of my sleepy state. Shaking, I got dressed, pulled my hair back, and picked up my pristine book of lesson plans, and stepped outside of my house.

My first classroom was right next door and I walked in to see an ocean of children. The smallest ones, all of whom looked far too young for the class, sat in the front of the packed room. The students got taller and older as my eyes traveled back to the massive boys who took up the far wall.

Were these sixth graders?

We all stared at one another and then it started.

“Vazaha!” one child yelled out. Then others took up the call.

“Vazaha! Vazaha!” White person! White person!

I tried to tell them to stop, to start taking attendance, but my voice left me. My heart pounded faster as the word volleyed around the room, bounced off the walls, and hit me in the stomach.

“Vazaha!”

Before I could stop them, my feet walked out of the classroom and I stood next to the door, trying to breathe. What had I gotten myself into?

A girl followed me out and giggled at the sight of her panicked teacher, a response I later learned is how Malagasy people get through tough times. But at the moment, I felt certain the laugh meant she felt happy to see her teacher in such a state. She wanted me to suffer! I couldn’t believe it!

She asked me a question in Malagasy and I didn’t catch it, I was too busy trying to make my head stop spinning. But focusing on her words and what they meant helped me calm down. Finally, I sussed it out.

She’d asked, “Are you going to teach us or what?”