Why I Want to Earn a Doctorate

The largest room in the world is the room for improvement.
E.C. McKenzie

    As an educator in elementary, high school, and university settings, I have maintained high levels of enthusiasm about and faith in the value of education. By being innovative and always interested in being a student myself, I retain passion which seems to strengthen with my convictions. Because of my evolving belief system, I feel compelled to go to the next step, which is a doctorate degree.

   First, I believe in change. I am idealistic. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said, "Man's mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions." The new ideas that I have encountered by innovation, by study, by experience have stretched my thinking and my aspirations. I long to reach the next horizon and find the next idea. I am intrigued by possibility and entranced by how such wonderful changes in thought often come from the serendipity of just living. I believe that our educational system must, and will, change and adapt to what educators are learning and to how the world is shifting around us.

   Second, I want to do more than experience my own personal odyssey. I want to leave a record of what I am learning. Since I was a child, I have written my thoughts. Words are a fathomless ocean, and with a few drops, we can write our experiences and thoughts for others to share. Professional collegiality and collaboration must be the precursors of effective change. This journey that I undertake is not one of solitude, but one that brings me into contact with those who teach me and who learn from me.

   Last, I am in love with teaching and learning. For me, those two processes are inextricably bound. There is no way to teach without learning or to learn without teaching. They form a circle, a cycle, that sustains itself. To continue in my education is to also expand what I am able to teach. I love teaching teachers. My goal is to train those who enter the classrooms, to give them tools of compassion and intelligent resolve, to arm them with conviction, to prepare them to love what they do and to do it well. To do that, I must know more than my experience, I must know the experience of many others. Doctoral study is one part of that knowledge. It will add the wisdom of reflection, investigation, and synthesis to what many lives have contributed.