Undercover Superheroes: The Hidden Powers of Teachers
“I got into acting because my teachers kept nudging me into it. The power a teacher has to influence someone is so great. I can’t think of a profession I have more respect for.”
~Jon Hamm (Actor, Former High School Teacher)
Teachers have the best occupation in the world. Now more than ever it must be a special feeling to be an educator. Truth is they are among the most happy people on the planet. They love what they do. Currently innovation, technology, and progress (specifically vertical progress) is at a low. In our current state we don’t pay enough attention to this. Our teacher’s have the opportunity to help guide the ambition, dreams, hopes, and minds of generations to come. They are catalysts for growth. Given the great frontiers in front of us, there’s simply no better occupation to have right now. They also help us in the present times. Their job fuels our economy. This isn’t talked about enough. And it goes beyond that. To be able to help people reach their goals in life is such an honorable job in and of itself. To look back on past students successes at the end of a teaching career must be one of the most heartening experiences for any human being. Quite a resume. They are “life-influencers”. Having an occupation where the accomplishments of people in which you taught is your resume must be extremely fulfilling. This leads me to my big four reasons and ways in which teachers are our past, present, and future superheroes. 1.) Happiness 2.) Engineers of Progress 3.) Economic Gains 4.) An Intangible resume.
- Happiness
Educators are happy people. Not only do teachers have the ability to mold the future through education and get to create their own living resume through those they each, but the stats prove how happy they are. The Guardian looked at nine different surveys conducted to find the occupations that make us happiest and then did their own survey of these surveys looking for the professions which appeared most often in the top 10 of each study. Their findings revealed the top 3 Happiest Professions were:
#1: Engineers
#2: Teachers
#3: Nurses
It should be noted that Teachers were ranked in some surveys as high as “first” overall while Engineers only got as high as second. In that same article Karina Thompson, a reception teacher at Greenleaf School discusses what makes her happy about teaching:
“The lightbulb moments — watching children make leaps in learning. There are many laugh out loud moments during your day, and I love the variety and creativity of the job — you can be doing drama in the morning, pretending you are a superhero, then demonstrating gymnastics jumps, then the next lesson is life in Roman Britain.”
Lots of variety seems like a definite perk but it runs deeper than that. It’s not that it’s being ranked consistently as “the best” job or the most “financially rewarding” job, but it’s being ranked as the “Happiest” job. Meaning people who work as teachers generally are the 2nd most satisfied people on the planet! Most importantly what these findings say to me is that they prove the “money doesn’t buy happiness” adage as a universal truth. Teachers may not be paid millions of dollars like say a sports star or hollywood celebrity, they may not be walking the red carpet, or on E! news nightly and yet they’re still the most fulfilled people of any job in the world. Happier than sports stars, doctors, lawyers, movie stars, politicians (Trump and Hillary seem happy these days?), and almost any other job out there. Interestingly enough big money and fame is in fact often hollow gratification. I think of the character “Smiley Wade Bowman” from one of my favorite films “Thirteen Conversations about One thing”. In the film he always comes into the office to his “desk job” which might seem monotonous and boring. Yet…he is happy. He loves his job. And it genuinely angers Alan Arkin’s character Gene that this guy is so happy. Maybe some jobs aren’t so boring. And the fact is, the common surface reasons for happiness (fame, money) may actually be false decoys for genuine fulfillment. There’s a gypsy curse they reference in the film “May you get what you want” or one that I think of is “Be careful what you wish for.” Some occupations are not what they seem. Change happens suddenly. Glamour is fleeting. Pay attention to the subtleties in a world where red carpets seem to rule the roost. This is deceiving. Behind the curtain our teachers are moving us forward with a wink and nod. It’s inspiring.
2. Engineers of Progress
Helping teach people to be their best by educating them is in turn dictating our future. You may not not be hitting a home-run out of Busch Stadium or winning an Oscar, but the amount of influence educators have on change is tremendous. Aside from having the gift of being able to enjoy what they’re doing, teachers also have the gift of being able to mold the future.
UNC-Chapel Hill published a column “Why Consider Becoming a Teacher” discussing the jobs perks. In it they wrote:
Teachers get incredible joy in seeing the difference they make as students gain new insights, become more interested in a subject and learn about themselves. Every day, teachers mold the future through impacting their students’ views and understandings. Teachers foster creativity, develop character, give students lenses with which to view the world and provide students with the skills they need to reach their potential and lead productive lives.
It seems to me that as progress moves forward and we advance as a species there’s nothing more important than accumulating knowledge through learning. Teachers of every subject are our vessels for this. Not only that, they hold the key to not just define what we learn but in how we learn it. The world is changing. We now have computers and the internet. Teachers have the opportunities to share their knowledge through websites such as Udemy.com and degreed.com.
Degreed actually empowers learners. It tracks learning in a new way, from a new angle. It will change the job-recruitment world. The fact that learning is starting to transition itself into the web’s mainframe is a frontier we are just scratching the surface of. And the teachers have the keys to that vessel. They have the ability to influence us in the classroom and beyond. Teachers are pioneers for innovation.
3. Economic Gains
Education fuels our economy. In fact, it is a key to a healthy economy. Since teachers are the trailblazers of past, present, and future learning it is common knowledge that educating the minds of the future help create jobs. In 2012 George P. Schultz and Erica A Hanushek in Wall Street Journal article titled “Education Is the Key to a Healthy Economy” wrote:
“In addressing our current fiscal and economic woes, too often we neglect a key ingredient of our nation’s economic future — the human capital produced by our K-12 school system. An improved education system would lead to a dramatically different future for the U.S., because educational outcomes strongly affect economic growth and the distribution of income.”
They go on to write that if a school improvement program made the USA competitive with Canada in math performance over the next 20 years, these newly skilled students upon entering the work force would drastically stimulate the economy with stunning results. The improvement in GDP over the next 80 years would exceed a present value of $70 Trillion. That’s a 20% boost in income for every U.S. worker each year of his or her entire career.
It’s a fact. With Knowledge comes economic growth. Our teachers are the leaders in the movement. Even though the economy has had it’s hard times recently, the fact of the matter is education has the power to fuel it. Just htis month the department of education announced that our high school graduation rate is in fact at an all-time high.
In fact in a speech at Northwestern in 2012, President Obama said:
If we redesign our high schools, we’ll graduate more kids with the real-world skills that lead directly to a good job in the new economy. If we invest more in job training and apprenticeships, we’ll help more workers fill more good jobs that are coming back to this country.
There is no occupation that has the power to stimulate the economy more than educators. Our teachers hold an important key for economic prosperity. This cannot and should not be overlooked.
4. An intangible resume
Teachers are influencing the minds of the future. Students go out into the world and make things happen. To be able to say you influenced the lives and careers of so many is an extremely admirable virtue. We see people making advances in silicon valley, politics, sports, medicine, news, law-enforcement, communication, education and marketing and all too easily forget that the reason they are successful. The superheroes who educated them smile quietly in the wings remembering how they inspired and helped them achieve their dream job.
This is not a resume one can put on paper. It is organic. It is unique. There’s none like it. Nelson Mandela so wisely stated “Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” Teachers are our champions of change, progress, and innovation. They influence the world from mission control and are warriors of progress. They are in fact, our undercover superheroes.
Geoff Pilkington
A recent podcast I was on discussing my theories on ADHD:http://www.seeinadhd.com/adhd-mind/
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