Over the last two and a half decades I have met and taught around two thousand children.
They ranged in age from infants and toddlers through to 12th graders.
They have told me stories and taught me more than any teacher preparation program or mentor teacher ever could.
I learn from them every day. Sometimes the lessons make me smile, laugh and make me feel good, and sometimes the lessons make me cry, or they break my heart, and sometimes they crush my soul.
Sometimes their experiences energize and excite and motivate me. Sometimes their experiences exhaust me and make me question my choice to become or stay a teacher.
I am not the only teacher who lives this. To some extent, we all do. Some classes and schools and locations are harder than others and some ages are harder than others, but it’s rarely easy. I don’t say this to argue about what teaching should or shouldn’t be, or what schools should or shouldn’t do, or what society should or shouldn’t expect from either. I’m just sharing things that have made me think, changed my teaching, impacted who I am as a person, or stopped me in my tracks and made me reconsider everything I thought was true.
I’m sharing them because in the never-ending conversation about education the quietest voice is that of the children. Not the gap-toothed pigtail first-grade girls, or the third-grade boys in their soccer uniforms with arms crossed and looks of bravado as they show off their trophy, the real kids I have spent over twenty seven years teaching. The kids who should be heard because their stories aren’t always pretty and don’t always have happy endings, but they are real and they should be told.
