A Teacher's Morning Coffee: What Makes My Job Great

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

What Makes My Job Great

I leave for school around 6:00 a.m. On the way I pass a small bank, corporate IBM buildings, law offices, gas stations, and, of course, the local Starbucks. At such an early hour, I cannot help but wonder what it would be like to work for one of these dark places I drive past. “So many jobs,” I think, “And I’m still in high school.”

As I enter my classroom, however, I’m quickly reminded of what makes my job great. As the day goes by, these reminders continue to come, continue to refresh me, and continue to inspiring me.

What makes my job great is I have autonomy. My approach is different than the teacher’s down the hall, so am I. Only I know how my students receive their material and only I am know how to make adjustments based on their progress. This autonomy keeps me monitoring progress, keeps me eager to try new methods, and keeps me creative. There is only one way for surgeon to perform an operation, but there are a million ways to teach students math, and I can choose any way I want.

What makes my job great is I get to work with others who share a common goal. Though our approaches differ, in the end each of us teaches to see students recognize their abilities and travel down the road to actualization. It isn’t always easy, but I’m never alone.

I have the most loyal customers of any industry. Unlike other vocations, I work with the same clients five days a week. Our students spend more time with us than they do with their parents. I am more than a math instructor, I am a friend, mentor, motivator, and developer of human beings; I am a teacher.

What makes my job great is I know the beginning and I know the end. I know in the beginning I’ll have a fresh group of students, raw, yet full of talent. I know I will run an emotional, nine month long gauntlet that is the teaching year. And I know that in the end, I’ll have watered down eyes as I bid farewell to a fifty close friends that started as fifty new students.

What makes my job great is my students are funny. They walk a fine line between having fun and learning; and I’m happy to keep it that way.
What makes my job great is that I’m finishing this posting while talking with four of my students during their lunch period. Since they came specifically for “a chat,” I need say goodbye, this is, after all, what I teach for. But, I promise to expand on these great aspects of our job later. Until then, I wish you good conversations with your students as well. I love this part of our job.

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Dear Teacher

Dear Teacher,

Let us open our memory to when we were students seeking our degrees in education. Be it college or grad school, from day one we were taught how to teach. Between demanding methods of teaching, classroom behavior management, curriculum development, and the like, our professors modeled the ideal classroom. We presented lessons to our peers, critiqued deliveries, and role played numerous classroom scenarios until we all had an idea (or at least we thought) of what faced us in our journey ahead.

In the chaos of student teaching, interviewing, graduating, and so on, some of us forgot why we entered education in the first place. We simply did not choose jobs; we chose a vocation that impacts the rest of the word. Our souls have great purpose in what we are doing and there is something within all of us that moved us toward the classroom. Teachers thrive in the classroom, what we have to offer is more than subject material; we long to share ourselves.

Our belief in one student can change the world, yet we were unable to materialize our beliefs in our "how to teach" courses. Believing in students is an understanding of why we chose teaching as our careers. It is difficult to believe any of us chose this vocation without the ambition of changing student lives. Propelling one student beyond the content material is the difference we make as educators. As teachers, we must teach in such as way that our students can reflect upon their education and use us to mark history.

State testing and the bureaucracy that comes with our evaluations, tenure, and outside judgment will continue to haunt us all. Though rarely talked about and certainly not fully developed in our educational training, our desire to reach the adolescent heart is omnipresent. You are not alone in your quest to lead students to a greater peak in their learning, one higher than any state test can measure.

We have chosen an emotional occupation; the days may be long, the journey exhausting, and the victories difficult to see. Throughout this blog we will find meaning in our teaching through why we teach and allow it to transform how we teach our students.

Come on the journey with me to discover why we became educators. There is something deep within calling us to pursue more than the subject we teach. Our hearts long to be part of a story more important than standardized tests and student success hinges upon us being masters of that story. Rarely have we been given a chance to listen to our heart and reflect upon why we teach. Together we will pursue the source of the ever flowing spring of educational desire.

We are in a career in which we receive little monetary compensation. We are frequently berated from lack of tangible success and often blamed for the problems with America’s youth. Yet we are connected emotionally to our occupation. We love it….but sometimes the system kills the passion we had entering education and brings us a new reason to educate, to pass the test.

What happened to our initial motivation? What stole our spirit and how do we get it back? In the end, it is not really about dollars and dimes, what parents think of us, or how well our students remember Romeo and Juliet or the Pythagorean Theorem; it is about giving ourselves to our students. And when we give ourselves, there we will find true joy, there you will find motivation to keep teaching. There you will find the purpose in what we do.