This is a different kind of book about teachers and schools. It doesn’t give advice on teaching better, or planning lessons, or managing the complex set of personalities to be found in every classroom. It doesn’t talk about brain research, or pushing students up the test-score ladder, or best practices for classroom management.

 
This book assumes that you know all that – or enough of it. It assumes that you can stand and deliver, that you can cover the curricular bases, and that you can do a great job helping students learn.

 
This book is about the most critical challenge that begins once you’re very good at your job as a teacher. It’s about your happiness.

Joy and happiness matter a great deal for exceptional teachers. They are the fundamental currency of the profession, and many truly amazing teachers don’t get enough of them. You know the statistics, and you’ve probably lived through the sad lessons they reveal: check on the group of new teachers that starts out in any given year, and in many schools, about half will be gone within five years. Too many will leave even though they love teaching and are well on the way to becoming truly outstanding and effective teachers. They take stock and decide that the negatives are just too negative and the positives are not positive enough. For many it’s a close call. They say things like, “If I could just have classes a little bit smaller,” or “If I could just get a little more support and respect from the administration,” or “If I could just have more time to work with those three or four kids who are really falling off track.”

 
Teachers need support: material support, community support, and personal support. Just as teachers need to acknowledge each student as a real human being in the middle of his or her own story, teachers themselves need exactly that same kind of recognition and regard. Great teachers need this more than most, and our collective enterprise of keeping these great teachers teaching makes it a vital if unmet imperative.

 
Every great teacher needs to see the power of his or her work acknowledged and celebrated. Every great teacher needs to hear the too-often unstated gratitude of students and their families. Perhaps most importantly, every great teacher needs to take the time to acknowledge his or her own love of teaching.

 
My friend Michael, a veteran English teacher in Massachusetts, is a gifted and energetic classroom leader and a man who cares deeply about his students. He can be a big-presence performer, and a quiet listener – he’s got a great range, and a great ability to match the right side of his personality to what his students need at any given moment. Ask him what makes him so good at his job and he’ll say, “It’s because I’m the luckiest man alive, and I know it. Here I am, earning my living, feeding my family, by talking about ideas and books every day, by guiding young people and their families through these amazing years of their growth. I am a lucky man.”

 
You feel the truth of every word as he says it, and if you’ve had the chance to know Michael for a few years as I have, you know that this is not simple enthusiasm. These feelings are hard won. For four years, after he left a teaching job that had stretched through a decade of enormous happiness and success, Michael began climbing up the administrative ranks at a couple of new schools and lost some of the happiness he’d had for years as a teacher. His sense of purpose was undiminished, but he began to feel less successful at his work – he wasn’t getting things done as an administrator as easily as he wanted to; he could not make his vision for his new schools quite real. He began looking, again, for a new professional home – for the right place.

 

As months and then years ticked by, Michael told one friend, “I think maybe I’ve been dreaming the wrong dream.” This was not ordinary sadness. This was an emptiness growing where an unusual fulfillment had once been. This was the hard learning of a man who’d grown up in a warm and rewarding professional home, discovering the harshness of the wider world.

 
Michael’s struggle was particularly great because the stakes were so high. He was not simply wrestling with finding a new job or smoothing a bump in his career path. He was fighting his way back to the work that he knew was a big part of his life’s purpose – work that he knows he does remarkably well, and that matters such a great deal. Imagine the feeling: you help young people make their way in the world – learn to read and write; learn to recognize and talk about beauty; learn the history of their country and the skills of thinking mathematically and scientifically – and you do it with great skill. You see the difference you, personally, make through your dedication and experience and skill, the difference you make in the lives of dozens and then hundreds of young men and women, and then you find the door to your classroom locked, the invitation to practice your craft rescinded, and the gifts you have to give unwelcomed. If it was just about you, that would be one thing, but this is about you and about the students you will no longer reach. A doctor barred from healing the sick, a singer banned from singing, a firefighter not allowed enter a burning house – that is the feeling of the exceptional teacher, contemplating the end to his or her path in the classroom.

 
And then the call came for Michael. An offer, unexpected, arrived: would you teach at and lead a new school – the right school? The familiar joy rushed back in. “You can’t tell me,” Michael said, “that there is a better way to live, a better way to step up in life every day with a hundred young people holding your hand. It doesn’t get better than that, and I know that there’s no one luckier than me waking up every morning.” That’s a fantastic sense of good fortune, but it’s more than luck, and more even than the payoff after years of discipline and personal challenge. The joy Michael celebrates is a vocational joy – a joy that comes from knowing that you are doing what you were put on earth to do.

 
The skill set of the teacher can apply to so many other fields – to law, to government, to television, to corporate leadership, to the sciences. But a teacher is here to teach. Feeling that in your bones, dedicating yourself to becoming unusually good at the craft and finding your place in the world by finding your place in the classroom – this is the joy that the great teacher feels every day, even if in hard times it might be easily overlooked. Like my friend Michael, we do ourselves and the world at large a great deal of good if we recognize and celebrate that joy every day.

 
We get too few social cues and formal invitations to step back and look at how vital and how joyous our work with students can be – not joyous every minute, and perhaps not every day, but joyous often enough that we keep in mind how lucky we are to do what we do. And while the truth of this statement is more than enough reason to say it and believe it, the larger reason to cultivate and celebrate the happiness of the great teacher is that students are the ultimate beneficiaries of this happiness.

 
Your happiness matters a great deal to your students. Your pride, your personal sense of accomplishment, and the mutual gifts you share with your students are perhaps the most important teaching tools in your classroom and can overcome just about any obstacle.

This book is an occasion to celebrate the joys of teaching, the skills and sacrifices of teachers, and the greatest teaching tool of all, the teacher’s heart.