Why I am a teacher

 This evening, I posted a moment from my day at work. I told my students that I'm not a teacher to fail students, believe it or not. Naturally, they asked me why. When I told them, a kiddo said, "that's the best reason I've ever heard."

It got a bunch of Facebook likes. It also sparked a friend (who recently became a teacher herself) to ask me why I became a teacher. The answer is too long for a Facebook post. It was too long to give in full in class. If you work with me, I PROMISE that I gave a synopsis and not the whole story.

You, like my student, may think this is the best reason ever. You may not. That's fine. My reason is my reason and, like it or not, it's good enough for me. So without further adieu, I give you my reason.

When I graduated from college, I got a job at a temporary agency as a liaison between the temp agency and the company that was temporarily employing workers from the agency. I worked for the temporary agency itself but on-site with the client (Caremark).

While my responsibilities included mundane things such as checking people in on their first day and taking attendance and fun things like celebrating birthdays and running contests based on attendance, I also had the responsibility to let people know when they were on a warning or when they were being let go. I'm pretty sure they asked me to fire people because they (the agency) knew it sucked and didn't want to do it themselves.

There came a day when I was informed that a worker hadn't passed her third test (actually, she'd failed all three - and you can't do that) during training and she was going to let go of her.

I don't know if I'll ever forget the look on the first woman's face when I told her. There is NO nice way to let someone know they're fired, by the way. There are nicer ways and mean ways, but none of them are really, truly nice.

She cried. She asked me how she was going to feed her three kids - her husband had just lost his job, too. It totally sucked. I did the only thing I could do: I shook my head and I cried with her.

Not long after, I was up on the call center floor, reviewing files and I noticed that a woman's attendance was shaky at best. I talked to her and found out that her baby girl was super sick. Born with heart problems, she was in the hospital, fighting for her life. The worker was trying to get hired on full time at Caremark so she'd have insurance. Unfortunately, she didn't get hired on in time. Her baby died, she and her husband had HUGE problems (they were living with his parents) and she got kicked out of the house, and to make matters worse, her attendance problems caused her to lose her job.

I felt completely helpless in both situations. It was their performance that caused the problems but I wanted to rescue them both from their situations.

I'm a teacher because of those women. I'm a teacher because I don't want that life for anybody and if I can get in there and make a difference in a kid's life and help them turn it around, that's what I want to do. I have come to the realization that I can't do it for them, but I can help them learn to help themselves.

That's why I'm a teacher.