Why I Teach

My name is Matt, and I love teaching.

Obviously, this is a blog by two high school teachers, so naturally this half of the blog’s authorship has some inkling of passion for teaching. But when I say that I love teaching, I mean that it’s a lifestyle for me.

My wife, Jessica, thinks my penchant for instruction is, at different times, charming, funny, quirky, and downright irritating. When she asks me to teach her a new board game – this past Wednesday, it was “RISK”, my all-time favorite – she now knows she is delving into a serious engagement that may very well occupy our entire evening. For more on the hazards of “teaching” your spouse, see Hoek’s post on leaving the teacher at work.

(For all you RISK fans out there, wondering how it turned out… she made the mistake of conceding South America and Australia to me in consecutive turns while she hammered away at North America. I crushed her two turns later.)

Now, to make some use of that digression: the joy and thrill of my life is the moment, great or small, when a student gets it. Hopefully, you have had the privilege at least once in your life to experience this moment for yourself and/or witness it in someone else. It is the moment when the forehead transitions from wrinkled to smooth. The eyebrows, once scrunched and drawn together in confusion, now lift up with surprise and relief. The dull glaze falls from the eyes, and they are filled with recognition and resolution. These moments of learning are food for a teacher’s soul, and I am no exception.

My point is that while I have a love for my students and a desire to see their destinies realized, my desire to teach has a very mercenary component. I enjoy it, and get a kick out of it.

On the other side of the same coin is the calling that I feel toward teaching. God has created me to be a teacher, and I can’t seem to do anything else.

Trying to think of an analogy, I came up with Casey, the golden retriever up with whom I grew. (Thank you, Winston Churchill.) If you’ve ever owned a retriever, you know very well how they earned their moniker. They retrieve stuff all the dang time. Shoes are the stereotypical item of choice, but lacking that, Casey would bring us stuffed animals, baseball gloves, remote controls, pillows… anything he could wrap his mouth around. And just try to play a game of Frisbee with him around. He never had as much fun as when he was chasing down a long throw from my dad.

When you looked at Casey, you knew two things:
1)God created that dog to go get stuff and bring it back.
2)He loved doing that more than anything else.

Whether I’m fulfilling my calling well will be up to my peers and principals and ultimately my Lord. For now, I’m content doing what I was created for as best I know how.

My name is Matt, and I love teaching. I look forward to sharing my life and stories with you.