Why teach...

Our principal sent the following e-mail to all of us today:

Teachers,
Please send me by email or leave it on my desk, the name of address of someone who has had a great influence in your life. Someone who may even have helped you as you made your decision to become a teacher. It might be a parent, grandparent, spouse, sibling, or friend. Please try to have the name of that person and their address to me by Tuesday.
Thanks,

When I first saw this I thought, okay who is one person who influenced me to take this sometimes unbelievably frustrating but often just as unbelieveably inspiring job. I began thinking back to college professors, not much there, I was a history major convinced that I destined to find more info about Civil War battlesites and then to move onto saving them and the countless lost Revolutionary War battle sites. This revelation happened my freshman year when I was one of the lucky few at my small liberal arts college to take a Civil War history course from Shelby Foote. Foote wrote a large three-volume about the war, we got to read his book and ask him questions about his research and his writing for 4 hours every week. As a freshman in college, it's easy to be intimidated in this setting but Foote was a master at making everyone feel important and to assure them that they needed to be part of the discussion because he wasn't going to be the "sage on the stage" it wasn's his style. If you don't know who he is, watch Ken Burns' fabulous Civil War series, he's the older gentleman who Burns uses as his expert. Foote wasn't the only one but he is the only one with the stunning southern accent.

But, as with most people, what I thought I was going to be my life's work got slapped down by the reality of having to get a job and pay bills.

Then I thought about my high school teachers, nothing there. High school was four years of reminding myself how much I wanted to escape my hometown and to never look back.

Grad school professors? Please, giving us teaching ideas and theories that themselves wouldn't use. I learned more from spending two years counseling at-risk kids.

In the end, it came down to my parents, namely my father. He wanted my brother and I to find jobs that weren't blue collar and had both a future in them and an end. A career where you could retire while still a relatively young man, and could enjoy life.

Although there are parts of the job that are easy to hate, there is more of it to love and it's better than what my folks had.