instructor qualified

Yesterday I completed my official instructor certification training for the Army. I am now officially instructor qualified.

This is the instructor badge that instructors are supposed to wear at the Army Medical Department (AMEDD) Center and School. My peers call it "The Push-to-Talk Button."

The instructor training doesn't really teach you anything - it's more a test to make sure you are an OK public speaker and you know not to fraternize with the students. After more than 20 years, I think I had that figured out.

Getting this badge for me was sentimental and exciting.

Sentimental because when I came on active duty as an officer in 1992, I remember all of the instructors wearing these badges and thinking it was a mark that set them apart. They were a part of something that I was trying to figure out.

Exciting because since I was a kid, I've always wanted to be a teacher. I thought maybe I'd be a high school English teacher at one point, then I thought I'd maybe teach philosophy to undergrads. Then life gets in the way and you wind up spending a couple of decades doing other stuff you never really thought you'd be doing. But next Wednesday I will stand in front of my first real class - and I will finally get to do what I have always wanted to do. Oh, and I'll be teaching graduate-level Macroeconomics. It's a long way from Shakespeare, but a rose by any other name - well, you know the rest.