Where has all the passion gone?

When I said last week that I believe is passion, I realized something. I have lost my passion somewhere in the past 10 years. Mostly I've lost my passion in my job and maybe that's part of doing any job for so many years. On August 17, I will starting my 8th year teaching. It will be my third loop of Kindergarten and first grade. When I was in my education classes, I kept hearing this statistic that 1 in 3 teachers will quit before their 5th year teaching. I can say at the end of my 5th year teaching I considered it. It was a hard year and I was trying to figure out where God was calling me to be. I'm so glad I didn't quit though. While it was having a mortgage and bills that kept me from quitting, it was God who kept me teaching. Slowly, I'm starting to feel the passion again. My last two years were hard but rewarding. My kids made so much progress in reading, writing and math. I worked harder than ever on coming up with new ways to do things that worked for this group of kids. But in a couple of weeks, when I'm faced with my test scores, I could hear that I didn't have a successful year at all. I could hear that my test scores were low and I'll need to work harder this year to bring them up. I have always told myself that it doesn't matter what these scores say when I know I've done everything I could. But I know in the first of August if this is what I'm told, I'll be crushed. I'll have an even harder time finding my passion for teaching. Don't think I don't love kids and teaching them. It's just all the stuff that goes with teaching that is hard sometimes. I think this is a profession that lends itself to burn out more so than most. Most years I begin the year with excitment for the new challenge. I always try to set a goal for myself of something I want to improve on in my teaching. You can even find me working in my room or on the computer getting things ready for the new year before we have to be there. But it never fails, that something will derail me. Something will come in and ruin my positive attitude. Sometimes it's in the form of other teachers who like me are tired and over worked. Mostly it's in the form of some new mandate being brought by the state. It's in the form of some kind of testing that kindergartners and first graders are not ready for. Or some ridiculous expectation that I could never meet like all my students scoring in the proficient zone but it doesn't take into consideration the kids with special needs, or the kids whose parents don't ever do any homework or read to them, or the fact that 5 and 6 year old progress at many different levels and somethings just aren't appropriate developmentally. (I know I'm on a soapbox here. I've opened a can of worms trying to explain where my passion went.) This year I really want to keep my positive attitude. I want to be excited and passionate about teaching. Last week during Wednesday night youth, the youth pastor said he believed teaching was a calling. That it was something you just had to do like being a preacher was a calling. It hit me that I was where God was calling me to be. He called me to be in the classroom. To be a voice for kids and to help them find their own voice. I have the opportunity to affect many lives in a school and I'll never take advantage of that if I let all the negative get in the way. So this year for my goal, I plan to keep my positive attitude and excitement and passion for teaching. My original thought was to shut myself up in my room if need be to keep the negative out of the room. To some extent the only way this is possible is to shut myself up in my room and ignore all other teachers. But I keep coming back to the idea of affecting lives. Kids are not the only people I interact with but also other teachers. So instead of locking myself up in my room, I need to be encouraging to the other teachers. In fact we need to be encouraging to each other. So I challenge everyone who reads this blog (thanks Sarah Martin, she's the only one I know for sure.) to encourage any teacher you know. To show them, you value what they are doing and you value their hard work. That could go a long way to keep the positive attitude. I know at my school everyone is working as hard as they possibly can and we aren't the only ones.


I'm sure I'll be challenged every corner I go around, but I know that with God anything is possible.


In Joshua 1:9 it says "Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go. "