When people find out that I am graduating, they slap me on the back and ask me what I’m getting my degree in. I smile and respond, “It’s as much a Master’s in Humility as it is a Master’s in Teaching.” After six months of teaching in high school and middle school, I have come to understand the two are inseparable.
The MAT@USC has been, by far, the most challenging experience I have ever endured in my life. I think it’s harder than Teach for America and more transformative than a life coaching seminar.
As a student teacher, you’re expected to follow the curriculum and program as planned. This was particularly challenging for me as I would often find myself yearning to run class on my terms. I learned to deal with things through reflection and introspection, but that felt isolating at times. Although you have a guiding teacher in the room, much of your support comes in the form of your MAT classmates who you see weekly through a webcam. You begin to think you’re going crazy when you can’t wait to talk with a face in a box on your computer… But it happens!
Being a student teacher, you learn that it is necessary to not take anything personally. Each hour is filled with an unbelievably diverse ecosystem of children teeming with issues, problems, and questions that are completely outside of the realm of your teaching. Every day is a new day. You can have the most engaging, most phenomenal lesson planned for one day and when you show up the next day it’s like it never happened. You can completely crash and burn one day, but when you show up the next day the same expecting eyes will be looking up from a desk at you waiting to learn. But you must show up all the same.
Teaching is all about learning. It is not about showboating, it is not about distributing information, it is not about control. 
Teaching, as last year’s explosive documentary infers, is about being a superhero.
If I knew what I know today would I still do the MAT@USC? Absolutely. Before I joined the MAT@USC I taught at one of Greg Mortenson’s schools in Pakistan, a private school in China, and inside of huts in rural Kenya. But it was a high school in east Los Angeles and a middle school in the Valley where, surprisingly, I saw the greatest need for change. It is also where I found the greatest potential for revolution. Our education system needs a drastic overhaul – but it’s not going to come from politicians or administrations. It’s not even going to come completely from teachers. It’s going to have to come from students – and the teacher’s role will be to mentor and support them through the most drastic era of change in human history.
I had to remind myself during my time in the MAT@USC that I wasn’t a teacher, yet. I was a powerful kind of half-breed: half student, half teacher. I had both curiosity and confidence. This gave me extraordinary insight into the minds of students, into the structure of the system, and reminded me that we must never, ever settle for anything less than the best when it comes to learning.
That is why technology is imperative to the future of education. 
We as teachers must embrace technological tools for transforming our schools from day care centers into vibrant learning environments.
We must learn how to teach media literacy to a group of students who, for the first time in the history of this nation, are spending more time consuming media than they spend in school! We must instill a sense of ethical and moral clarity that cuts through dogma and relativism and sets an example about how to rightly treat one another. We must not be discouraged by a bad day in the classroom or by a bad year in the district. We must not be distracted by our own personal problems and forget that we are everyday given the lives of children who too often see more of us than their parents. We must be open to new ways of teaching and learning that may require us to open up to new languages and less time speaking in front of students and more time listening.
