Transcript
What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. Hello, I'm Josh Johnson. I'm a local educator, and I'm also the president, CEO of the 621 Art Gallery located in railroad square. I am a six generation telehacian Leon County, and I come from a seven generation family here. And for me, that means a lot of things. It means that everything that I see is a memory to me. And sometimes that's good. Sometimes that's bad. Sometimes that's conflicting. But whatever it is, it resonates because this place is home. People know me in three different ways. When they see me in public, they say, you hear that the politician, the teacher, or the 621 guy, and I've gotten used to living in those three spaces. Going into politics was actually my default mode. It wasn't a new thing for me. It's what I have been doing. The teaching is newer. The adjuncting is newer. The marketing is newer. The politics and the activism and the way we see each other socially and financially have always been the things that have guided me. My inspiration is a responsibility that sometimes weighs on me from the kids that I see every day and the things that they go through and knowing that as much as you help, you'll never get it all done and reconciling that. You get to a place where you say, if I am never going to be able to help all of them, the last thing I can do is be satisfied helping 15 of them. I've just got to keep going. And so I think my inspiration and my grounding socially is what I do every day are from seven to one. Their passports, each one of them will take you on a trip somewhere else and some of the places are heart-wrenching and some of the places are heart-filling, but they are. Those students are my little passports. Whenever I want to go on a trip, I talk to them or I let them talk to me. It really is that. I'm Josh Johnson and you know they say those who can't do teach. I just want to be known as the teacher who does. You're listening to voices that inspire.