I'm celebrating having one of the world's best jobs this week. As teachers, we all go through peaks and valleys throughout the school year. After sitting in a couple of career day sessions I was reminded of why I love teaching.
It humors me to hear how many of my students want to be engineers, but lack the vision to know what a typical engineer really does on a daily basis. Instead they live in the fantasy that an engineer works when he wants, follows his passions all the time and his ideas always result in million dollar profits. I decided to visit the engineering presentation at career day to see if I had missed out on what I was meant to do in life. Maybe the kids knew something I didn't… it's happened before. Listening to an engineer talk about the pride he felt watching the completion of a challenging construction project made me reflect on the feeling I get when I hear a student say, "ahh" when they truly understand or the way their face lights up when they have success at a challenging task after hours of hard work. Having a usually ungracious adolescent say, "thanks for the last two years" or "I finally get it" is worth conversations with helicopter moms, extra hours spent grading to give proper feedback and planning effective lessons. Every day we get to do the problem solving of an engineer, data analysis of a scientist and personal interaction of a counselor. Our job is awesome, it just has an undervalued name which is why I'm changing my job title to youthful mind engineer. I think it has a cool ring to it.
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