I was at party recently – a fancy party. Many of the attendees were graduates of the same Ivy-League college, and they had their catching up to do after ten years or so of post-college life. One cluster was typical – a young doctor, a lawyer and an investment banker talking with my friend, a teacher.

 

They talked about spouses, vacations, missing old friends, and an adventure or two from their undergraduate days. Then the banker made some efforts to lure the teacher into confessing to the group how little she was paid. She told them – literally causing the lawyer to gasp. But all the while she displayed the happiness that wins any argument, and her old classmates felt just a little bit embarrassed in the end, just a little bit shaken to have forgotten for a moment (or perhaps for a decade) the deep good fortune of doing what we love, and doing it well.

 
When I think back on that party, I think of the teachers who start every school year shutting their classroom doors and telling their students, “We are all so, so lucky to be here together,” and really meaning it. I think of the people I know who haven’t been able to give up the social prestige of other jobs, or the higher salaries, or the sense that their parents or their siblings or their neighbors might think less of them if they became full-time teachers, and I feel even more fortunate myself. I never have a moment of doubt about the importance of my work as a teacher, and never a moment of wishing I was reviewing contracts for a living, or building houses, or even healing the sick. My calling as a teacher keeps me deeply connected to young people whom I can help, and who help me; whom I can teach, and learn from; who surprise me every day, and allow me to be the version of myself that makes me most proud.

 
I think, also, of all those teachers who have no shortage of bad days, chilly colleagues, and unthinking supervisors – and never enough dry-erase markers no matter how persistently they requisition or how many they buy. I think of how we can experience that terrible day, or that class that just does not work, or the student who will not recognize his own ability, and still feel that little flame of good fortune, of pride in our work, of knowing that we are doing the work we are here to do, flicker back on like a light in the darkness. Like most great callings, being a teacher can be difficult and at times thankless, but it remains a true vocation and a great anchor for any man’s or any woman’s life.