For My Teacher Friends

I found this in the October issue of Real Simple and wanted to share this with you, you know who you are. I hope these words are an inspiration to the career you have chosen and cherish.

“The main reason I became a teacher is that I like being the first one to introduce kids to words and music and books and people and numbers and concepts and ideas that they have never heard about or thought about before. I like being the first one to tell them about Long John Silver and negative numbers and Beethoven and alliteration and “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and similes and right angles and Ebenezer Scrooge … Just think about what you know today. You read. You write. You work with numbers. You solve problems. We take all these things for granted. But of course you haven’t always read. You haven’t always known how to write. You weren’t born knowing how to subtract 199 from 600. Someone showed you. There was a moment when you moved from not knowing to knowing, from not understanding to understanding. That’s why I became a teacher.”

~Excerpted from 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny: Life Lessons From Teaching, by Phillip Done