I’m in my 13th year of being a teacher. In the short time I have been fronting classrooms and marking essays, I feel like I have experienced a lot. From a heart stopping moment where I stopped a 25-year-old male from assaulting a Year 9 student in my first three months of being a PE teacher, to sharing a chairlift with Year 11 and 12 students on our schools New Zealand Ski trip.
I have many great as well as awful memories. But recently I have been looking at some of those around me, who are entering into their third decade of teaching and I wonder to myself, how do they do it?
After 13 years I truly feel spent. The pay is good, the holidays are amazing, my colleagues are outstanding! Why would anyone want to leave this gig?
I have recently found myself dreaming of retirement or even changing careers, but I feel stuck, because I actually have no idea what else I would do for a career. I have a family to look after, a mortgage to service, for better or worse I am stuck with the job. At the moment I’m taking it year by year dreading what the next 30 years will look like.
The journey
If I’m completely honest with myself, I did not get to where I am today without solid divine intervention. I was incredibly lazy at school; my exit scores would never get me into university. But the Lord had a plan. I managed to complete an Advanced Diploma at TAFE, which opened a door for me to do a Bachelor of Secondary Education.
Again, to cut a long story short, my entrance into TAFE in the first place was very much an opportunity given to me by God. I was not academic, at least I was too lazy to be, I scraped through university. Then came my pre-service teaching opportunities and finally in the academic world, I began to shine. The last 12 months of university is where my foundations were set. I worked hard, I taught well and graduated with the highest teacher rating you can get.
Every job that has come my way is because the Lord had directed every application, every interview. When I reflect on my 13 years, whether I’m tired of the job or not, the Lord has always wanted me in this space.
The purpose
Term 2 has just started, during the holidays I was convinced this year could be my last. Quietly struggling with the career, only my wife knowing my true feelings about the job. I entered into the new school term downtrodden, tired, a little hopeless.
Then just yesterday a student knocked on my staffroom door and asked if he could have a chat. He shared with me his emptiness at the death of a close friend recently, a young man crying out for help and trying to make sense of a terrible accident that took the life of someone far too young. This student’s father left him when he was young and has not been the source of experience and wisdom that this boy needed. This kid may not be my son, but after teaching him for years I may just be the closest thing he has to a father.
Then during our ANZAC day service, a young man got up and gave a short story about how his father was killed in Iraq serving his country. He was only weeks old when his father died and hearing this story, I wept. This young man greets me with a handshake every day.
That same week I consoled another student while she told me about the mounting health issues that she keeps facing. She too lost her father when she was very young. It was after these three instances, where memories of other students in the past that I have taught, counselled and hung out with, caused the fire in my belly to start to burn again.
We live in an increasingly fatherless generation; where high school students will go to school not knowing their real father, being estranged from their father, abused by their father and rejected by their father.
If I were to leave teaching, I would be throwing away the vehicle which the Lord is using for me to achieve his purpose and demonstrate his love and grace. He has led me to this place to stand in the gap (like so many of my fellow colleagues) to be that positive role model, friend, father figure that these kids so desperately need.
Onward
I still feel exhausted and overwhelmed by what my job entails at times. But I think that when you are called to something, when God has led you to a particular career, I don’t think it is going to be smooth sailing. Satan will want to get rid of you and put you in a place of fear and hopelessness so that you will give up, and I think the Lord will allow you to suffer through it, so that we will humble ourselves and trust Him to be our strength in a job that so desperately needs strong men and women of influence and integrity.
So, here is to an extra 30 years of being a teacher and God willing, being the ‘dad’ some of these kids really need.
A burnt-out offering.