About 8 months ago I graduated from Grand Canyon University with a bachelor’s degree in Christian Studies. Fast forward just a bit, and now I drive to a job every day where I am responsible for the health, safety, and education of a bunch of 7-year olds. For eight hours a day I am surrounded by thirty children that are under my direct influence, with hundreds of others passing through my purview at different points throughout the day. It seems crazy to me. How can I be in charge of all these kids, when I still feel like a kid myself?

Thankfully, I’m not alone. At the school where I work, there is a wonderful setup in which there are two teachers in every classroom, an assistant and a lead. I am the assistant, which I could not be happier about. I can only imagine how much I would feel like I’m drowning if I was in a typical public school where I would have been thrust into a sole lead teaching position all on my own, with little guidance or training to go along with it.

It’s a good thing I have been given the opportunity to ease my way into teaching, because quite frankly I am not too good at it. Believe it or not, the biggest thing I’ve learned in teaching thus far is how much I have to learn. Right now, I’m bad at this, and that’s okay. I am here to grow.

To put it in a cliche sort of way, teaching in my first semester has been hard but good. It’s put me in a lot of situations that have pushed me and in which I’m not particularly comfortable. It’s made me face a lot of my faults in ways that I’ve never had to before. I was always pretty good at school, so I was usually able to coast, and being a janitor wasn’t exactly the most stressful or pressing job. Nor, if I’m being honest, did I always care about either of those things as much as maybe I should have.

But now, in teaching, a thing about which I care deeply, I am being constantly tested by my pride, selfishness, impatience, anger, laziness, timidity, fear, and cynicism. And this isn’t a job in which I can simply give up, which I did with multiple different assignments in college that I simply decided I didn’t want to deal with. I can’t give up because teaching matters to me, and it is something which I desperately want to get better at.

This will come as a great surprise, I’m sure, but teaching is a supremely humbling experience. Not only because of the things I have already mentioned, but also because of the children who sometimes seem like they are trying their very best to drive me as crazy as they possibly can. Believe it or not, but second graders don’t always listen? They also seem to have an adept ability to sense even the slightest hint of fear, frustration, or confusion by the teacher and choose that exact moment to strike with their most bizarre behavior. In only a few months of doing this, I already have a backlog of stories about the strange things I have seen in these kids, things that sometimes make me want to laugh and other times things that make me want to repeatedly bang my head into a wall.

One of the most sobering realizations I’ve had, however, is the recognition that I was once one of them. I see myself in these little 7-year olds, especially the boys (which does occasionally make me think “this is hopeless”). More than that, I see myself most in the ones that drive me the craziest. It’s strange how God often sets us up for such irony.

One of my favorite moments of my first semester reminded of a lesson along these very lines. About a month ago, the school had their yearly winter concert where each class goes up on stage in a large auditorium and sings some wonderful songs for an audience of family and friends. The fear going in, of course, was that the students would choose this exact moment to be on their worst behavior of the year and cause an absolute trainwreck to occur at this very special event. Instead, the exact opposite happened. Little hiccups came along the way, sure, but once they were on stage they performed their little hearts out.

Seeing not only my class, but each class in the school, go up on stage and perform so beautifully really made me stop and reflect. It came after a rough couple of weeks for me personally on the “teacher’s learning curve”, and it truly got me to think, “This is why this job is worth it.” I ran into my Headmaster after our class was done with their portion of the concert, and he put my thoughts in a really helpful and succinct way: “It’s a nice reminder, isn’t it? Seeing the kids all up there almost makes you wonder how they could cause us so much stress on a daily basis?” Indeed. In that one moment, they went from a “job” and a source of seemingly infinite frustration to the sweet gift and beautiful creatures that God intended them to be: children, made in His own image. If only every teacher could remember that truth at all times, especially when they are “in the fire”, so to speak, of a particularly crazy school day. And maybe, as flawed as some of these children certainly are, it would do us well to admit every so often that maybe, just maybe, some of our greatest frustrations have to do with our own restless hearts, rather than the behavior of the kids.

Teaching is not an easy job (I know, another cliche statement…but it’s true!) Sometimes, especially with some of the most challenging students, it can feel like we work and we try and we love and we do all the things we can think of to help, and it seems like we’re going nowhere. It can seem fruitless, when you work so hard to help a child who’s struggling (either behaviorally or academically) and by all indications you’ve gone nowhere. I can only imagine how that is compounded over years of teaching and the number of students who cross your path grows. But as with most things that truly matter, you pour out the kind of work that you feel should give you drastic results, but it produces an almost undetectable effect. In real life, we don’t typically get these grand, dramatic, world-changing events. Instead, we live for the little moments of victory, like that winter concert. And perhaps even more often, you sometimes live and work for the moments you’ll never see, but hope will one day come to pass under someone else’s influence.

Teaching is hard and humbling, for sure, but it’s also fulfilling. It’s fulfilling because only hard things can be fulfilling. There’s no satisfaction in a task that doesn’t force us to struggle—when we aren’t called upon to show responsibility, perseverance, integrity, honesty, courage, citizenship, humility, friendship, and wisdom. It’s fulfilling, furthermore, because in each day I realize how much kids actually have to teach us boring, bitter, insecure, and apathetic adults about life and virtue.

In the end, oddly enough, the challenge of the teacher is to daily embody in our profession those very virtues which we seek to instill in our students. It is realizing that I too am still a student, and the best way for me to teach is by example, living out the virtues which I desperately long to see in those kids.

Element5 Digital