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The Autobiography of a Reader

                Hospital doors slam open as a woman is rushed into the emergency room.   Her name is Renate Kunze and her husband Jim stays by her side.  The clock reads 9:35 p.m. as the doctors rush into the room.  Anxiety runs amuck through everyone in the room.   On the wall, a large twelve-eleven hangs, letting everyone know the date.  As 9:37 nears a cry is heard, the cry of a young baby boy.  A baby boy that would later grow up to be the man named Brian Kunze.

                I am Brian Kunze, and I had an interesting time of starting my life.  My parents had been married to their ex’s before they came together.  My mother, Renate, not only left my two sisters behind, but she left her homeland of Cologne, Germany behind.  My father, Jim, also left my two brothers behind.  At first, my parents met in Florida, but decided to move up to Plymouth, Indiana to take over my grandfather’s radio station.   Ever since then, I have lived and grown up in the town of Plymouth, Indiana.

                Growing up at first was not the easiest thing to do.  My dad still had to pay child support for my youngest brother James.  Even though my dad owned and operated a radio station, it was still hard to get the money together for food.  Finally, my dad’s ex-wife allowed for my brother to come and live with us.  This helped us as the money my dad was paying for James could be put to better use.   We built a new house, got a new car, and finally grew together as a family.  However, my mother and James did not see eye to eye and eventually James left the house and went to live with my aunt.  With his leaving, my mother has kept me close ever since. 

                While growing up my parents decided to put me into a private Roman Catholic school.  Being a private school, the classes tended to be small.  My class had a total of twenty students in it, and we stayed together for all five years.  We grew close together, becoming like a family.  However in our fifth grade year we were all hit hard by tragedy.  Our fourth grade teacher developed cancer over summer vacation.  To us she was one of the best teachers we had ever encountered.  However, she was taken from us right after we returned from Christmas vacation.  Her death affected the whole school especially those of us who had her in class. Saint Michael’s school has helped made me who I am today.   I was terrified going from the private school to the public junior high school.  I had no clue who  the majority of the students in the school were.  I became shy and unlike other students who thrived in it, I went into the shadows and stayed away from people.  This carried on until I got to high school where I finally got involved in activities.  First thing I did in high school was join their Academic Club, a club that went to Science Olympiad and Academic Super Bowl.  After my freshman year, I was left with running the club as it had fallen apart leaving very few students participating.  By my senior year I had rebuilt the club and had acquired over twenty five other students to participate.  Due to my hard work with the club, I led Plymouth High School to its best Academic Club season in fifteen years. To me that was one of my biggest successes in high school.

Also in my senior year, I joined the Business Professionals of America Club.  The reason I joined this club was my interest in business and owning my own business.  One of the divisions of the club was web design. For web design, a team of four had to create a website based on the theme of new technology.  After working for three months on the website, we were finally ready to take it to the state competition.  The four of us all had high hopes on the website as our teacher told us we had the best website she had ever seen from her students.  For us this was huge as teams before us had gone to the national competition with much worse websites.  After we presented our website and got our scores we were all mad.  With all the hard work we put into the website, we finished dead last to the other schools.  This was one of the biggest disappointments in my high school career.

                As stated above, I had a big interest in business, but there was another interest that I had that needed a look at, history.  While looking at the history profession, I realized my best bet of a job was to go into education.  Even though I was not sold on becoming a teacher, I had decided to take advantage of a class my high school provided and that was cadet teaching.  For cadet teaching, we would get with a teacher in the school system, from any school besides the high school and learn about the teaching profession.  I picked one of my favorite history teachers, Mr. Richards.  Mr. Richards taught sixth grade history and was in his final year of teaching.  Because it was his final year, he let me do many things other teachers would not have allowed.   I was allowed to come up with lessons and teach the students.  I also was taught how to create a lesson plan.  I did virtually everything a teacher would do during my five months in the classroom.  As time progressed I started to fall in love with teaching and by the end of the year I was completely sold on teaching.  Thanks to this class, I fell in love with teaching.

                There are a few reasons why I fell in love with teaching.  One of these reasons is my love for history.  Knowing about the past and sharing it with others is one thing that has always made me love teaching.  Another reason is that I get the chance to help students.  In helping them I get a chance to change their life if it is going wrong.  Helping students go from a student making bad choices and turning them into someone good is something that drives me to become a teacher.  These are just two reasons as to why I want to become a teacher.

                At the end of my senior year I finally started to break away from the pull of my mother and do things I wanted to do and not things she wanted me to do.  At first I did not tell her I had started racing. Eventually however it came out and surprisingly after all the no’s I received about it, I got a yes.  This to me was my biggest victory, getting a yes from her.  Unfortunately, the victory did not transfer to the track as in my second race an oil line in the car broke while leading, causing a fiery mess.  After that I got into a car with less horsepower than the last car.  This kept me from winning any races for the season, which was a huge disappointment, but to me getting the yes was a victory.  One other victory for me was getting the opportunity to work towards getting my hot air balloon license.  A friend of my father’s had a hot air balloon.  Naturally I was drawn to it, as I loved all aircraft.  As my friend’s dad retired from ballooning, my father took over his old post of running the balloon festival in Plymouth.  As the last two years have passed so has my father’s and my yearning to have a balloon.  These are the things that have been victories and disappointments in my life.

                After knowing what I wanted to do for a career, I had to take a look at what college to attend.   Eventually I came up with three colleges: Valparaiso, Manchester, and Indiana University.  Valparaiso had a great history department, but lacked a great education department.  Indiana University was for me too far away and too big.  That’s where Manchester came in, a great education department, a slightly lacking history department, but nothing I could not do without.  That’s why Manchester became a perfect fit for me. 

                My life has had as many ups and downs as anyone else.  With being an only child I did not have much influence from other siblings.  From a private school to the voyages of college life, each experience has changed me in many ways.  Disappointments and great joy have come and gone in droves. Each of these challenges led me to my greatest joy of learning my career choice thanks to cadet teaching.  Each event, even though it may have been seen as small, has impacted my life greatly.