Gabrielle Winters | Learning Engineer

So. The big question. Why do you want to teach? Well, the answer isn’t as simple as people want it to be. I will still give the simple answer I have devised after trial and error. This answer I have devised with long drawn out conversations where everyone who was interested are now beginning to doze off. My short answer is that I want to make a difference. I want to change lives and grow the future. That seems so simple right? Ha ha. I laugh at your naivety. Education is not simple in any way. We want it to be. Administration, the government, parents, students, and (I promise you) teachers wish, want, beg, and pray it were that simple.

But, alas, it never is as simple as you hope. Instead, it is far more crushingly difficult to achieve the long thought and dreamt of goals of a teacher. We spend our childhood dreaming of the lives we will change and the engaging lessons we will teach only to discover that students are not always so cooperative with your awesome, fun, engaging, life changing lesson you are trying to teach. Kids never cooperate do they? It’s like herding feral cats with a vacuum cleaner. It’s loud, painful, and soul crushing. It’s also entirely impossible.

So, we spend our days doing the very best we can to anticipate any problems we may face as we herd our cats through our class. We hope that the hours upon hours of worrying, planning, and praying to change the lives of just one student succeeds and we achieve our dreams and goals just a little bit.

Or…

We have mental break downs in our cars before going in our homes over how little we feel we have accomplished. We send about 10 minutes worth of Snapchat videos to our friends explaining how our days are going. We talk about how we are so tired that we fall asleep anywhere, anytime. No matter what’s going on around us. We procrastinate on our homework because we are struggling to have motivation at the end of the semester. We watch Grey’s Anatomy because who needs education when I can watch my way into a medical degree. (Insert eternal facepalm here). November is a hard month. No one has motivation or spirit. We are all struggling to just make it to the next thing. No one feels ready for student teaching. We all feel like babies who are about to be teaching babies that are just a bit smaller. We are so close to the rest of our lives that we are having existential crises at the thought. Adulthood?? Who needs that when you can cry your way through your last year of college..

Then, all of the sudden, you work with a student on his behavior for one of your many crippling projects. You see this unmistakable change in his heart. You see his drive to please you and do better to get your approval. And suddenly you realize that you actually are accomplishing your dreams and goals in being a teacher. You realize that you are slowly but surely becoming the teacher you have been striving to be for so long. And suddenly it is all worth it. You just have to keep pushing through, and take things one day at a time.