My Answer

Last week I was interviewing a prospective teacher and as we were wrapping up, I asked her if she had any questions for me. She had a couple of good questions and then ended with this one; “You’ve been doing this work for a pretty long time. What keeps you motivated and excited to get out of bed each morning?” Here was my answer…

There are lots of ways I could answer that question because there are many reasons I love my job. But I’ll give you two – one more tangible and one bigger picture. The first reason is working in a school is a ton of fun. Those old clichés are true - kids really do and say the craziest things and every day really is different. Kids are full of energy, curiosity, and love and getting to be around them all day brings me a ton of energy and fun too. What other job do you get to watch 4th graders perform a touching poem about his best friend where the principal (me) is the villain for trying to put them in different homerooms this year? Or get to see kindergarteners dress up like elderly folks to celebrate the 100th day of school, complete with canes and a pocketbook full of mints like their own grandmother has? Or try to figure out just how did that giant piece of poop end up in the middle of the bathroom floor?

At the same time, working with kids gives you the chance to do something with the gnawing feeling in your stomach many of us have that the world is full of increasing darkness. Whether it’s violence in our communities that are so common that they just barely makes the local news or tragedies like the one in Florida that dominate the national conversation (not to mention the policies of our current administration) we know there are many times our students have questions/worries/fears and as educators we don’t know what to say to them. Do we say anything at all? What if we say the “wrong” thing? How do we comfort our kids when we don’t feel any comfort ourselves? 

And yet…I’d much rather have that pressure and responsibility than not. We are in the unique position to take our feelings of fear, frustration, and despair and channel them into doing some good about them as part of our actual jobs. Most people in most jobs don’t get that chance since their day to day just keeps rolling along; filling out that spreadsheet, roasting that chicken, or cutting that next head of hair basically go on as usual. But as an educator, you have kids sitting right in front of you. And that gives you an opportunity to push back against the darkness in the world and take real action to bring more light into the world. You can make tomorrow joyful, caring, and engaging for your students. You help your students reach their fullest potentials so they can be the leaders of tomorrow we need. And when things are darkest, you can be there to show students they have people around them who love and care for them. I’ll never forget gathering all of our students together the day of the Sandy Hook school shooting to talk to them before they got on the bus home. Knowing they would hear about this horrible tragedy that had taken place to kids their age at a school that could have been theirs, I wanted their teachers and school staff to tell them what had happened, how much we loved them, and how we make sure they are safe in our building. 

Both that day and today, I don’t pretend to have the answers to our country’s problems but I know that every day I’m working with kids,  I’m doing something to push back against the worst our world has to offer.