Edupreneur Spotlight: Cassandra Pawling
Cassandra Pawling, a culinary arts teacher at Desert Pines High School in Las Vegas, has noticed that it’s the stressors outside the classroom that have created internal conflict for her much more than the day-to-day stress of teaching.
Pawling’s edupreneurship journey with Educator Dynamics has allowed her to face inward, identify her unique strengths, and rebuild the confidence she once had as a young teacher.
“It’s really easy to get worn down by other people’s pessimism,” she explains. “But I’ve learned that we do have the ability to create our immediate surroundings.”
Pawling says there’s been a disturbing shift over her two decades in education. Today, she says, teachers have to overcome the emotional aspects of dealing with pivotal, sometimes devastating, societal issues, sometimes on a near-daily basis.
She explained that the emotional toll of confronting fears in an era where school shootings, food insecurity and now, the COVID-19 pandemic, can become overwhelming.
“It’s really easy to become discouraged, especially when you hear people talking negatively about teachers,” she says. “But you know what you’re getting into — you know it will be stressful, and people will question you.”
“Still,” she continues, “you love it, and that’s why you chose it. It’s not for everybody, but for those of us who are here, programs like this help us to stay strong, despite these issues.”
Pawling freely admits that she, like so many of her fellow teachers, began to lose faith in her abilities somewhere along the line. “One of the things that happened to me personally is that my confidence as a teacher started to dwindle, and I used to think it was because I wasn’t doing enough,” she says.
Pawling’s turning point came from working with Sandi Herrera, Founder & CEO of Educator Dynamics. “Working with Sandi, I realized it’s not that I wasn’t doing enough,” she explains. “It was a shame I felt less confident because I wasn’t a bad teacher — I was a good teacher. I had just started to question myself.”
