I Don’t Want to be a Teacher but I Love Teaching.

I have worked in positive youth development (PYD), after-school, and in-school programs for the past ten years. I never intended to work with kids; it came to me through a random chance opportunity. However, I am so grateful I got that chance because from the second I first played a game with a group of students, I knew that working with kids was what I was meant to do.

What I loved about working in PYD programs was that the focus was completely different from traditional modern education. Education focuses on building academic identity and, if students are lucky, connecting it to personal identity. Typically, the primary goal in education has been to get a good one, so that you can presumably get a good job and have a good life. Of course there is much more to it than just this, but for the most part that is what I have observed education to be.

For the past two years I have been lucky enough to work in a middle school that has space for classes where kids can learn how to connect to themselves. I have taught students about gratitude, core values, character strengths, goal setting and execution, time management, personal and academic responsibilities, self care, positive self relationship building, reflection skills, growth mindset, and self determination. These lessons have had tremendous effects on kids’ overall well-being, as well as pushing them toward holistic self cohesion.

PYD has caught them at a crucial time in their self-development where they are already naturally establishing habits, mindsets, and ways of being that will either help them survive or thrive in this world.

When you teach kids the benefit of positive habits at a time when they are naturally seeking these things, you help set them up for a lifetime of success.

My own experience in school was just fine. I did what I was supposed to do. I got good grades. I participated in extracurricular activities (first chair viola player even though I was terrible). I had plenty of friends and even had some close relationships with teachers.

But you know what else I had?

A complete lack of connection to who I was and what I wanted in life. On top of that, I had undiagnosed mental health issues and a pretty hefty substance abuse issue that was chalked up to me just being a wild kid. I couldn’t even look in the mirror without feeling like I wanted to smash it.

I thought this was all just a normal part of growing up, or at least that’s what I was told. I thought I would grow out of it. Instead, the disconnect and disdain I felt for myself only deepened as I got older.

PYD is about development of the whole self. In these programs students are given the opportunity to connect to their inner assets, the things that really make them who they are. Things like values, strengths, passions, and goals. These were things I didn’t get to explore about myself until I became an adult and was forced to find this work after almost losing myself completely.

When I was a junior in college, I was ready to take my life. I remember the first time I felt any kind of joy after a six month stint deep in my depression, was the day I decided to take my life.

What stopped me was a call from another friend, one who I was currently fighting with. He told me in that call that a mutual friend of ours had killed himself the night before.

This friend of ours who was super active on campus. This friend of ours that was loved by many. This friend of ours who was passionate about things in the world. This friend of ours that we never would have suspected. This friend of ours who had been silently struggling for years.

In that moment I was dropped back into my body. It was like my “feeling self” had been on vacation for 6 months and had a release of all that emotion I had backed up.

I realized that I could never go through with my plans, after seeing all the hurt, pain, confusion, and grief our community went through after losing this bright light.

I also realized that I couldn’t live my life like that anymore. Hating myself and constantly getting in my own way of happiness and success made life unbearable. I wanted to do better. I wanted to feel better. So I decided to invest my time and resources into developing the parts of myself that I had neglected for so long.

I began rebuilding my relationship with myself with the help of every self-help guru, personal development course, and positive self-care practice I could find. I researched positive psychology and educational psychology to figure out how to grow myself into a human that was not just surviving but also thriving.

I found so much work related to building my inner self. I saw a huge difference within my first year. I felt committed to myself and my future. I took my opportunities that were connected to things I cared about. I found new ways to experience joy. I worked tirelessly to dismantle self destructive habits and question who I thought I was supposed to be. Ultimately, I learned to show up for life by showing up for myself.

What shocked me the most about all this self-work I had done, was how little of it was found in my formal education. Especially because it all felt so connected. There was a huge lack of cohesion between my academic/professional and personal life.

My problem with how we raise kids is that too often we want kids to care about their grades before they even learn how to care about themselves. That’s why I’ve dedicated my entire professional career to teaching kids about skills that will prepare them to handle all aspects of life,
not just their educational and professional life.

Teens are labeled as “angsty” and “emotional” and their struggles are often downplayed as growing pains or flat out dismissed all together, which in return, warps how kids view themselves and their difficulties.

What my work seeks to answer is this: how would kids develop as people if we taught them to care for themselves first? My belief is that everything else in kids’ development follows after this.

Teach students how to love and care for themselves and they will naturally learn to care about their education, their future, and the world around them.

I don’t want to be a part of a system where I have to validate kids through grades. I don’t want to be another person who cares more about kids’ grades than their overall well-being and growth. They have plenty of people already doing that.

I want to be a person who tells kids that there is so much more to them than their academics. I want to be someone who teaches them how to grow themselves so that they can envision a life they want, and create a blueprint to go after it. I want to be someone who will equip students with the tools they need to go into life ready to fight for what they believe. I want to use all the power within me to advocate for this type of work, especially with middle schoolers.

So why don’t I want to be a teacher?

It’s not just from the current fear of getting sick due to teachers’ safety being disregarded during a global pandemic.

It’s not just because I do not want to go through the expensive and long process of becoming credentialed.

It’s not just from the blatant disregard of how hard teachers work and how important they are to our society.

It’s not even entirely because of the horrendous lack of compensation teachers receive for the amount of work they are asked to do. (That work being literally educating the next generation to hopefully do better than the last).

It’s because kids need more.

I want to do my PYD work with as many kids as I can possibly reach. But I am unable be credentialed in a subject that is not seen as important as academics in the education world. What’s wild to me is the lack of understanding that these two things go hand in hand.

With suicide being the number two cause of death among 12–24 year olds in America and the adult self-help industry making over 10 billion dollars a year, it’s clear that somewhere along the line education is missing something crucial. We are not raising kids into adults that know how to take care of themselves in this world. What we are really doing is sending under equipped soldiers into a battle for our survival as a species.

Young adults often spend the first half of their “adult” lives undoing the negative effects of being disconnected from themselves. So much energy, blood, sweat, and tear are spent recovering from the traumas of being raised in a system that disconnects one from their self.

One way that I know this, besides my own experience, is the response that I consistently get whenever I tell people the kind of work I do with middle schoolers.

“I wish I would have had that when I was that age.”

We treat our struggles, disconnects, and angst during our youth as a inevitable rite of passage but that does not have to be the case. With access so much more knowledge about how humans thrive, we should refocus and reprioritize the point of education and create a system that serves our students in the ways they actually need.

Maybe then, all that energy that is used on recovering from our childhoods can be used to take care of our present world.

I cannot do the work I want to do in the education system until we as a society recognize that in order to really thrive as human beings, we need to give kids more.