Tales From the Chair: What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

The other day I was asking Sadie what she wanted to be when she grew up and she replied “a teacher mommy because I don’t want to work…teachers give the kids all their work!”….well of course this made me laugh. Having not only friends who teach but a brother and sister-n-law who work their asses off as teachers, I tried to explain to my 5 year old that teachers DO work.

Now growing up I never wanted to be a teacher. When my fellow classmates in kindergarten were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, there were the usual answers – fireman (DB❤) veterinarian, astronaut, teacher. Teacher was never uttered by me. I wanted to be a movie star or a bird.  Hey, I clearly wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box.  I was less than fond of school, so the idea of purposely going back on a regular basis never appealed to me.

But lets think about some of the kids OUR teachers come in contact with on a daily basis.  Try to remember that a lot of these kids go home to an empty house after school.  There are students who are homeless.  There are ones who should be in high school, but have been held back a time or two.  Some students have kids whose parents are too strung out on drugs to care for their kids.  Some students who acutely feel the effects of financial hardships. We have to remember that a lot of these kids act the way they do because they simply haven’t been taught any other way to behave.  These kids are out there.  These kids who don’t have support at home for a variety of reasons. And the “teachers” in their lives are sometimes the only ones who care! Knowing this has really given me a new respect for the people who deal day in and day out with other people’s children, caring for them, teaching them, trying their best to set them on a path for success despite, in some cases, little to no support from the kids’ own family.  Of course their are the parents who are very involved in their kids education as well, to the point where we like to hand pick our teachers!!

Regardless I suppose my point is this: Thank a teacher…..they are the “other” people in our kids lives besides ourselves that are helping our children become the loving, successful, good adults we want them to be.

As for me, I’m still planning to be a movie star or a bird when I grow up!” 🙂