This Teacher's Prayer

A colleague shared this article with me yesterday. It's a longer article but well worth the time. Although my situation is different from most of the teachers in the story, many of my colleagues do feel this way. Maybe I'm just too new to teaching. Teachers do need respect. They need to be paid and treated as the professionals they are. They need all the tools and funding required to do the job. They need more paras and for districts to stop cutting positions for librarians, social workers, and other vital staff who enable them to better focus on the job of teaching and who help students arrive in class more ready to learn.

The main reason I'm sharing this article, though, is because I just want to be more like Edward Lawson. I know there are other teachers like him, and we need many more. It's unfair to ask more of teachers, but most teachers would and do expend whatever effort and resources they can to help their kids. Praying for my kids every day doesn't cost a dime and helps me to remain peaceful and make wise decisions in dealing with them. Loving unconditionally sometimes requires a little more work with certain students, but the reward far exceeds any frustration and effort, and it's also free. Putting my whole heart into what I do and looking for the needs my students have that fall outside of what I was hired to teach them means that my heart is on the line: bare and exposed to whatever my kids are suffering but also open to all the love, joy, pride, and laughter they bring me.

 Teachers need respect. They need to be paid enough to support their families, especially if we want to have quality teachers. (We could never afford to pay what they are truly worth, and that's likely far more than most people expect.) Teachers need support AND funding for the schools where they teach--for the STUDENTS they teach. Perhaps most of all, they need your prayers. Their students and their students' families need your prayers. But don't stop there.

Find ways to be actively involved in your communities, to support teachers, students, and families. We're all in this together. If we want our communities and nation to be better, taking care of our children is essential to that success. Schools are not only where children are taught to read and write and do arithmetic; they are where so many children's mental, physical, social, and emotional problems are identified and addressed.