Why Do I Do This Job?

Since my last blog post on Sacrifice and getting to make choices about how we handle our jobs as educators, I've had quite a whirlwind of emotions related to my professional life. Last Friday was a bit of a crazy day that ended with a lot of students receiving suspensions from school for various events. Everything from disruptions to fights and drugs. Those days are rare but tough to manage. One of the things that I always try to get students and their parents to understand is that suspending children is the part of my job that I like the least. I have never come to school, eagerly awaiting a situation that requires me to remove a student from the classroom where they learn. Suspensions are sometimes necessary to give time for the student to reflect on what went wrong and hopefully learn from their mistake so that the same behaviors do not cause them to lose a job or gain a spot in the criminal justice system later. I was suspended for fighting in school and I was also sent to ISS for having a smart mouth at inappropriate times. I learned from those mistakes, and I quit making them. I grew up.

In the midst of those suspensions, Mrs. Duncan had me visit her classes and talk to them about my culinary experiences on my trip to Peru in October. This week, I also got to teach a statistics lesson to Ms. Jesse's AP Psychology class. Getting back in the classroom reminds me why I got into education and it allows an admin to forget about the parts of your job that you really don't like. It's fun to teach when you haven't had a chance to stand in front of teenagers in a while and attempt to hold their attention. I did have a kid or two check out on me at a couple of points and it was an instant reminder of how hard a teacher's job can be.

So between the ups and downs of my job in the past week, I got a reminder of why I do this job. In school, we teach kids a lot of things. If we are being completely honest, they will never use much of the curriculum that we test them on. Most will not need to know the parts of a cell or the area under the curve of a polynomial. They probably won't have to identify the theme of a passage, run a mile for time or many of the other things that we make them do. If we are lucky, one of those pieces sticks with them and ignites a genuine interest that leads to a career. Those sacrifices that I wrote about last week are done so that we help make good people. Sometimes it is easy to focus on the students that drive us crazy and lose all hope in humanity. I'm pretty sure that there were some teachers that thought the same about plenty of us at times. But just like us, our students eventually quit making mistakes and they grow up. From there, they can be whatever they want to be and they can learn whatever they want to learn. And we are just like the people that educated us. We all do this job because we want to make things better. We believe that kids can be better, and we are willing to do that work. It has good days and bad days. Some days you teach them a hard lesson and some days you bore them with statistics. But either way, these young people grow up into adults. Some of them might even be crazy enough to become educators.