EduSpeak: The best parts of the job.
The best part of my job as an ex-schoolteacher, turned education professor, is to sit back and listen to my former students (now teachers) tell my current students the best parts of their jobs. Teaching is mostly long, difficult and just plain hard work. Rarely does anyone ever appreciate a teacher.
But, once in a while a student does.
In my course, we do this thing we call teacher panel, where current students ask former students anything they want to about teaching. It lasts a couple hours.
We have been doing it for ten years, and the questions are all over the map, but two questions always come up.
- What is the worst thing about the job?
- What is the best thing about the job?
This year while I listened to my former students (now teachers) answering number two, I wrote these down:
“My students make me laugh. I mean really laugh. They are hilarious. I shouldn’t laugh sometimes, but I can’t help it. Their comedic timing is amazing. I will have days I want to stay in bed, but drag myself to school, and first period, one student says something so funny to another student. I overhear it, and it’s so funny. I laugh out loud, and I am glad I got out of bed.”
“My students say things that show me that I matter in their lives. How many jobs can you say that about?”
“Students give me gifts. Sometimes they make things in art or shop or at home and then give them to me. One time they brought in a cake on my birthday.”
“I got an email from a student the other day who I had no idea I was helping at the time. It said that I helped her get through the worst year of her life.”
“I got married over the Summer and my name changed to Gikis, pronounced geeek-s. I had to stand before a class of 20 seventh graders whom I have never met before in a new school, where I never worked before and tell them my name is Ms. Geek -S. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Two weeks later, they were calling themselves the ‘geek squad,’ which naturally made me smile.”
“One mom came to Open House and burst into tears when she met me, because I was the first teacher who ever told her son that she liked him.”
“I’m a long term sub at the high school. My time is almost up, so my students tracked down the curriculum director of a school with over 5,000 students in it, and presented a petition signed by 50 students, demanding that they find a way to keep me. I almost cried.”
“I have a student who was born in a refugee camp, and he was accepted into his first choice college with a full ride.”
“On parent teacher night, I had the parents of thus one student who said they wanted to take my class. One of them had been a high school English teacher.
“Students who had me last year, came back to visit me this year.”
“My students try to help me keep my job. They have my back. Sometimes when I am observed by my boss for an evaluation, my students act like they are the perfect students, asking good questions and concentrating. It’s cute.”
“My students appreciate little things sometimes, like the fact that I listen to them.”
“They invite me to their games, plays and awards ceremonies, and if I go, they wave to me.”
“I had a dyslexic student who wrote poetry. When I took a group of students from school to a poetry SLAM in town, she impulsively got up to read her poem without asking me first. I cringed. The seasoned, street poets looked at one another as she climbed up on the stage to take the mic. But, when she read her poem, she came completely alive. Everyone stood, clapped and cheered. Her classmates went wild, whooping and punching the sky. She turned red, and smiled and looked down. She made it through the first round, to the semi-finals, too. When she sat back down, she said to me, hey, I’m a poet now.”