Let’s face it. Teaching is a TOUGH profession. Capital T Tough. Critics may say you only work 9 months out of the year and you end your day early. They have no idea.
Not only are you tasked with molding young minds with a tight curriculum in a short time frame. You are working with the most anxious, depressed, and distracted teenagers the world has ever known.
You aren’t just a teacher. You’re a counselor, social worker, advocate, coach, motivator, nurse, case worker, record keeper, and receptionist.
You spend hours creating lesson plans. You spend even more hours delivering them, while trying to motivate students, encourage students, answer the phone, answer the door, manage fire drills, internet outages, power outages, and parent complaints. Break up the occasional (or not so occasional) fight. Provide tissues for snotty noses and teary eyes. Counsel relationship struggles. Manage challenges with sibling and parent relationships (or the lack thereof). Then once the day ends, you can start grading and planning for the next one.
You have a supervisor to appease, a district and state department of education to comply with, and endless rules and laws that you didn’t even know existed.
All of that with a smile on your face, right? For a low salary that doesn’t go up every year.
You do it because you love the kids. Because you love seeing life change. It’s worth it. You’re reminded of that the day before winter break and the last day of school.
We can’t help take all of that off of your plate. Teaching will always be one of, it not the, most challenging professions. We want to come alongside you, to provide curriculum resources that are teacher friendly, easy to use, and easy to grade. It’s an insufficient way for us to say thank you for what you do.