Lose Yourself to Find Yourself, Teacher

Dear Teacher,

You work hard. You pour yourself out every day. You give of yourself day in and day out. You sacrifice time and effort (and money) constantly for those young minds in your classroom.

You give yourself away and lose yourself to make a difference in the lives of those kids.

However, it is possible in all of the everything that you do, to get lost and forget who you are and where you are…and why you do what you do.

It happens to all of us. And as responsibilities increase for teachers, it happens more and more and more. It gets easy to get totally lost.

It used to be easy to find our way back to our why, but that is becoming something more challenging to do. I am finding out about increasing amounts of the best teachers I have ever met not making their way back home…and they are leaving the profession.

And I don’t blame them. However I hurt for the students that will miss out on their greatness.

I know there is only so much that we can do about the extra being heaped upon us, but we can deal with us and what we do when we are lost. We can find new ways to be centered and leave a path back to our why and who we really are as people away fro teaching.

And I think that is part of it. We have to remember our non-teaching self and make time for the things and people that we love. This centers us. This makes us whole. Even if it means missing deadlines or drawing lines in the sand you have to defend, you need to make this a priority. Losing your teaching self in your non-teaching self will renew your passion for students.