“Money, money, money
Always sunny
In the rich man’s world” – ABBA
That was the song I was singing when I finally got a job as a math teacher at Denton High School. $59k/year… Wow! [Okay, after being forced to Doordash half the summer to pay off bills, maybe I was a little bit too excited…]
It has been a very long ride, eight years to be exact, having worked through both the traditional university program and alternative certification (alt cert) pathways to becoming a certified teacher. (Long story!) Alt cert was lackluster and incomparable to the excellent Teach North Texas program at the University of North Texas. Yet neither program could really prepare you for the “baptism” of the first-year teacher. The long nights. The never-ending list of things to do. The emotional crashes. The sheer amount of district language, policies, and procedures you are expected to learn overnight. You want to be “the greatest” but can barely keep up with being “good enough”. Which is bad news, because that’s what they are paying you for: teacher greatness. Or… Student grades? Um… Standards? … Right? Wrong. If I learned anything in the first year: you are being paid to care.
Just a couple months in, I was getting out of school late as usual, around 7 PM, not having everything prepared for tomorrow despite the fact. Sat in my car in the parking lot a solid five minutes, just staring off. (That first-year stress and pressure is a lot!) The sun is slowly setting as the shadows from the light poles start reaching around me, as to give a gentle hug. Suddenly, there’s a man standing at my window. In an empty parking lot… Rolled down my window. The man has been driving around the school searching for his special-needs son. All my energy returned! This is the kind of stuff teachers live for. I leaped out of the car and walked the dad around the interior of the school to search for his son. After no results, we ended up back at my room.
I called up the department chair, who reached out to the principals. We narrowed down the students’ last known location. Police and fire arrived to search the area. Around 30 minutes later, we got news over the police radio that the student was found walking along the I-35 interstate. He was returned safely to his father and us waiting at the school.
Y’all: this is what we are truly being paid for. Being present with the students. Caring for them. Attending their games and hobbies. Doing what we can to enrich their lives. Even saving them. That is the job. If our role were only to deliver standards, AI will be replacing us. Khan Academy, IXL, YouTube, ChatGPT… those tools already exist and are teaching students. But they can’t care for a student. They can’t walk a worried father through the halls. They can’t show up the way a human teacher does. We must embrace this side of the profession all the more, because that is what will be the convincing factor when lawmakers sit down and debate whether to place our students in front of a tool or a teacher.
Afterwards, someone kindly texted me that I was a “good man”. Which was not true of course. I aim to live life for Jesus Christ, but I still sin. A “good teacher” might be slightly more accurate. But it’s nothing exceptional when I simply did what we are paid for. Paid to care. This is the attitude we must all embrace.
What big lessons / reflections do you have from your first-year teaching? What do you feel will differentiate teachers from A.I. as we move into this new frontier? Leave a comment below!
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