I think of working for money as necessary but not a very exciting pursuit, necessary to keep things moving around on the planet, but certainly not worth all the attention we give to it. Choosing a career in money, seeking to work just to make money, would be to choose a career that ultimately isn’t very uplifting.
On the other hand, working with human beings and in particular with children is working with a very very high form of energy. All that unformed stuff! All that crackling human movement all over the place! Are the adults who work with children just working to make money, or are they doing something much more difficult and ultimately much more uplifting?
But as in all good and wonderful things, what counts cannot be seen right away. Like with money, you work at some job to buy a new car, and voilà you have an instant cool thing to look at and drive around. But with kids, you work with them for a semester like we just did, and you see next to nothing in most cases. It doesn’t mean we haven’t done anything.
Think of where we are right now as being at half time of a basketball game. Some of us are up by ten points, some down by ten, and some of us are getting blown out of the gym. Not too many of us are in command of the game. So what? We can’t see the results of our work over the past five months. And we may end up winning the game by the end of May. Who cares?
At least we’re not working with boring, low forms of energy just to make money for the sake of having money. Each time we share a smile with a kid who has just successfully processed some bit of comprehensible input that we have tried so hard to learn how to deliver to them in our classrooms, we can’t measure what that means. We don’t know what that looks like in the invisible world. We can never know.
I lift my glass to all of us here who have just sloughed through the good days and the bad days of the first half of this academic year. We have known both the highs and lows of teaching. We have known real fear, many of us, and some of us have suffered with that school kind of fear every day. It doesn’t matter.
What really matters? It’s not what we can see, and the suffering will go away. What counts is that we are trying. We are taking risks most language teachers (99% of them) would never take. What counts most? Just the fact that we got up each morning in trust that we would be guided through the day o.k., that we would make it through another day of teaching. What counts most is that we went to work these past months. That right there is, in my view, the miracle.