Rewards Of The Profession

When I think of great teachers, teachers who are famous for having profoundly influenced someone's life, it is often in relation to someone who had special learning needs.  One thinks of Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller's teacher.  Or others whose names I cannot remember, like the New Zealand teacher who had a blind child in her class who later became an olympic downhill skier.

But for every special needs child there are a dozen others whose achievement and progress were perhaps eclipsed by their ordinariness.  Even brightness is fairly ordinary compared to blindness and deafness.  

The rewards of teaching are rarely sung but they are there.  We are shaping the lives of the next generation.  We are expanding their perception of the universe, increasing their depth and therefore their capacity for joy and sorrow.  We are challenging them to discover what they have within themselves, what they can do given the chance.  We are catalysts for psychological growth.  The children in our care are like precious uncut gemstones, becoming polished by their daily rubbing against their classmates, by their challenges, failures and successes out in the playground, by learning in their encounters with other peoples' stories how differently others experience life.

For me, the reward is seeing the children smiling at the end of the day.  It tells their mothers that they are safe and happy and being cared for properly while away from home. It is comparing their end of year marks to their beginning of the year marks and seeing how much progress has been made.  It is hearing them read fluently when to begin with they had to sound out each word.  And perhaps most importantly, it is seeing them support and nurture one another as a result of their growing understanding and appreciation of one another.

I am not writing these thoughts because I have come home from school wishing to give myself a pat on the back.  It is actually because of the frustration I feel about children not making progress and teachers stubbornly refusing to change their approach.  But I did not want to rant.  I just do not understand it.  If something is not working, why not try something different?  For me, the rewards of the profession are great and I could not bear to think of a single child being failed.