The Greek philosopher Aristotle’s advice about the moral dimensions of happiness has some importance here. Happiness, Aristotle told his students, is not about the satisfying of our appetites (eating when hungry, sleeping when tired, and generally getting what we want in the short term); and it is not about the honor and prestige that others might bestow upon us, nice as honor and prestige can be.

 

Happiness, he said, is really about virtue. It’s about doing good for others, and doing what a person is most suited to do – reaching one’s potential actively, publicly and with the good of others in mind. Aristotle could have been addressing a national teachers’ convention for how on-point his view of happiness is for people who make their living in the classroom.

 
He celebrates the particular kind of happiness that great teachers feel – and need to feel – as they get in the groove of their work. It’s the happiness of doing and learning and serving, of discovering and re-discovering alongside young people who need a guide, and giving those young people a strength they’d otherwise be without.

 
It’s hard and sometimes lonely work, often undervalued and too easily overlooked in a busy world. But Aristotle understood that virtue springs from action and that too few of us have the privilege to work to our limits physically, intellectually and even spiritually, as the engaged teacher so often does.