I know many of you teachers both retired and still working, are rolling your eyes at the title of this blog. Allow me to explain.
Obviously this photo is not of me. It is one I found online, and I’ve used it before. But what I miss about teaching is not what we see in this photo.
I don’t miss getting up at 5:30 AM. I don’t miss teaching the same lesson five or six times a day. I don’t miss dealing with discipline issues. I don’t miss my principal and supervisors popping into my classroom to do an evaluation. I don’t miss state testing. And I sure don’t miss long days of teaching followed by a night of working the gate at a ballgame.
I do miss the interactions with the kids and fellow teachers. You see, I taught high school Spanish or French for 25 years and served as a middle school principal for seven years. Each job had its drawbacks, and to be honest, I enjoyed being a principal for the most part. I loved working at the school in the summers when I could dress casually and work on scheduling and plans for the next year and interact with the teachers/coaches who were in and out of the school during the summer months as well as the interacting with the custodial staff.
Being a principal gave me a new perspective when I returned to the classroom. I understood more why principals had to do the things they did, and I understood that principals were not looking for what teachers were doing wrong. Instead, they (most) were looking for what teachers were doing right. I learned so much from the teachers I evaluated and incorporated some of their methods when I returned to the classroom.
It’s the students, though, I miss the most. They kept me young at heart and up to date with what was going on in the teen world. Sure, I was one of those teachers who thought I had to teach bell-to-bell (our supervisors told us to do that), and if I could go back and do things over, I probably wouldn’t do that all the time. I like to think my methods improved over the years, and as I learned how to do things in different ways, I think learning improved. I hope so.
Back to the students though. Most of them were great kids. They made me laugh. They made my day when they told me they finally understood something they’d been struggling with. I loved it when they came to my room before or after school just to chat.
To those of you still teaching, I get it. Summer break is wonderful and desperately needed to refresh and regroup. I know you’re burdened with a mindset of parents unlike any I had to encounter. Parents today, from what I’ve been told, don’t believe in holding their children accountable for anything, and I saw some of that in my later years of teaching. Like the parent who called me one week before school was out to give her son a passing grade when his absenteeism had been extremely high and he’d never made up the tests and quizzes he missed, resulting in a failing grade for every six weeks, yet she called one week before school was out? So I have an idea of what you’re putting up with. A slight one.
You may be discouraged and feel you’re not accomplishing much. You may feel students are not learning responsibility and accountability. But keep working at it. Keep trying. You’re making a difference with some if not most.
And someday, when you retire and find yourself no longer important or needed in the lives of students, you might miss it.
I know I do.
Life As I know it 