Your only job is to love them.

This post was inspired by Peter Greene’s recent Curmudgucation post, “A Treat, not a Treatment,” which reminded me of something that I learned about teaching and that sustained me for over twenty years.

This is from a pep talk I once gave for new teachers.

Your only job is to love them.

So you’re a teacher. It’s a lot, I know. It can be really intense. But it can also be sublime. 

When things don’t make any sense or come at you too fast, or when you get frustrated and angry, or when you feel overwhelmed, remember that it’s because you care. You care about your students and the work you do with them, and you want things to be better. 

In other words, you are not crazy. 

You’re just human. You’re a teacher. You might be working in a public school or private, a charter, could be elementary, middle, or high school. College maybe. Wherever you are--even retired!--I hope you have found what I’ve said here today encouraging and helpful. Or, we could have just skipped to the end because this is the secret. This is everything: Your only job is to love them. 

I was in my second or third year at Los Angeles High School. By the way, the third year sucks. I know people tell you that the first year is the hardest and that if you can get through that first year, you can do anything. Bullshit. My first year was easy because I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know how hard it was.

My first year was chaos. I might have been okay, I might have been terrible. I was so numb I couldn’t feel a thing. Bit by bit I figured things out and, in those days, new teachers had space to screw up and fix it. Now, not so much. 

So one of the first things I figured out was that I wanted students to have power over their own lives. By the time I got to my third year that idea had become my reason for being in the classroom, and it was then that I realized that I had no clue how to make it happen. Knowing what you want for students and not knowing how to help them get there was torture. That third year was murder.

Anyway, I was in the middle of the wilderness that was my third year and I was always on the verge of tears--even in the morning over coffee because I already knew what kind of day it was going to be and that I’d have no answer for it. 

Then, in the middle of one of those days, I see my friend Reed coming up the stairs while I am going down.

“What’s the matter, Jeff?” Reed had two more years of experience than I did and he offered me lesson plans and materials and a shoulder to cry on. He was a sensitive, thoughtful friend and colleague, one of many I don’t know anymore. That’s another thing that’s hard. Anyway, he asks me what’s wrong and I stop halfway down the stairs and he stops halfway up and I’m almost crying. 

“They don’t like what I’m asking them to do. I don’t even like what I’m asking them to do. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. What do I do?” Or something to that effect.

We probably only had two minutes to get to class, but Reed reached out across the hand rail and put his hand on my shoulder. He said, “Jeff, your only job… is to love them. That’s it. I gotta go.” And he hopped up the stairs and out of sight.

I know it sounds sappy. I think I even said “right” under my breath and rolled my eyes as I turned around. The thing is, I never stopped thinking about it. And the more I considered it, the more it made sense. In fact, it turned out to be the only thing that made any real sense at all. 

As teachers, we are hoping and trying to guide students in a direction we have chosen for them. Because we believe it will be “good for them.” Because we believe that their lives will be enriched as ours have been, and that they can and ought to have the power to make that happen. 

Along the way we are making a thousand consequential decisions every day. You will make more consequential decisions in one work day than most people will in a month: Call on this kid or that one. Press harder or ease up. Follow the plan, change the lesson, start over. Go faster. Slow down. Tone of voice. Eyebrow up or down. Give a second chance. 

You have dozens of dynamic human beings interacting based on their experiences and their perceptions of their experiences--most of which you don’t and will never know about--and it is terrifying. It’s like stand-up comedy meets the quantum physics class you’ve been placed in by mistake. But it’s also jazz and you really are trying to play together. 

In the middle of all that, teachers are trying to make the best one or ten or hundred decisions in every minute. Based on our training. Based on our experience. Based on our best intentions. You are human, and you are going to screw up sometimes. If you don’t, you’re not really trying to do anything significant. It helps if you remember why you’re there. 

Your only job is to love them. Each of us has to do the work of understanding what it means to us and to our students and to each student. But however you come to understand it, however you interpret it in your own practice, if you act from this place you will always be doing the right thing--no matter what anyone says. 

That’s it. That is the whole ballgame. Try and keep in mind that the kids are not the enemy unless you make them the enemy. Give yourself permission to love them and opportunities to do it, make sure everything comes from that place, and everything else can be learned. Without that, nothing you do makes any difference anyway. Not to them, and not to you. Have a great career. I can only hope you have as much fun as I did. Bon voyage.