Every year is an adventure when you're a high school teacher. This will be year number five, and I feel like I'm just getting started. Every year is so different - so exhilarating and exciting - that I sometimes feel bad for almost everyone I know - because they hate their jobs. I love mine...
My new students come into my classroom on that first day as tentative, unsure-of-what-this-class-will-bring teenagers. Most of them have vastly different backgrounds than I do. I was a lucky kid - two incredible parents, a solid household (I had the same phone number ever since I was born), never went hungry or didn't have presents under the tree at Christmas.
It's a different story for many of the students in my classes. I've had students who have never known their parents - only the cold-hearted, unfair foster care system. I've had students who can't do anything before or after school because they are literally taking care of their brothers and sisters at home - cooking, cleaning, working. I've had students crying in my office, breaking down in front of me, because their mother just doesn't care - about anything except drugs.
Yet I'll never stop being inspired by them. For every student who chooses to do drugs, drop out, choose violence - there are others who take much more difficult paths - ones where they make a better life for themselves. Every year there are students who will be the first to graduate from high school in their family. The first to go to college, and imagine a better life for themselves.
I can't imagine what their lives are like once they are outside the safe confines of my classroom - but I do know that they sometimes make choices I could never imagine facing. It's my job to be there - to teach them, to challenge them, to make them better people in a democratic society. Mostly, though, it's my job to help them find their way.
They've helped me find mine.
