The Vault presents prior posts from Teach & Serve.
The Gift of Our Work
We do not get tired of good Christmas songs. We look forward to their repetition each year. When beginning to compose a post for the week of Christmas this year, I realized I had covered the themes I wanted to in last year’s Christmas post, so I will present it again here and plan to do so annually. I hope you enjoy it.
On many desks and in many inboxes this time of year, teachers and administrators find all manner of remembrances – cards and notes and gifts, tokens of affection and appreciation. Typically, these trinkets and notes do not fully express the gratitude of the students we serve. They are lovely to receive. They are not always reflective of the appreciation our communities feel for us.
But, while It is an appropriate time of year for students to thank us, it is an equally appropriate time of year for us to be thankful.
As many of us finish our last-minute tasks, our baking and decorating and preparing, this is a great time of year to think about another great gift we in education are given: the gift of doing work that influences the future.
Our work reaches beyond us. It reaches through time. It reaches into the future.
We most often do not see ready results. While some of us have been in this work for an extended period of time and we have been able to watch some of the seeds we have planted grow in the lives our students lead after they have left us, we are typically immersed in the day-to-day, the checklist of the moment, the class to come, the next paper to grade.
It is challenging, then, to remember that our reach exceeds our grasp, ever and always. The work we do influences the world to come. It shapes society. It changes the world.
Changes. The. World.
That’s a gift worth receiving. It’s a gift worth sharing.