Dear You People,
You know who you are. You are the ones that look at us like we are crazy when you ask us what our major is and we reply "Education." You tell us that we are a special breed, and to get out while we can. You ask us why we would ever declare this as our major, and you hope we have patience.
But I am here to speak for all of my fellow education majors to nicely ask you to please stop. Please stop making us feel like we are some type of loony tune that has no idea what we are doing with our life.
Instead, we would appreciate if you would start thanking us. Thank us for taking on the task of molding the minds of the future of America. Thank us for being the people brave enough to watch your children and 20 of their best friends for 7 hours a day. Thank us for for being the special breed that you label us to be.
We know that it is not going to be easy and we know that our patience are going to be tested every day. But we also know that there are going to be days that those children put smiles on our faces that no one else could. We know that there are going to be times that we work our butts off in order to help a student understand something. It may take what feels like forever but when the lightbulb finally goes off, it will be like Christmas.
This profession doesn't make sense to everyone. We know that. We are also thankful for that because if everyone found joy in being in a classroom for the rest of their lives, we would be out of jobs. However, our job choice makes sense to us. We thought long and hard before deciding to do this with our life.
We also know that we are not going to make a lot of money. This is probably the most annoying response that we get. Trust me when I say that we do not choose this job for the money. We choose this job because it is what we are passionate about. We want live for the look in students eyes when they master their multiplication skills or read a sentence for the first time. We do not live for the 40-60,000 dollars that we will make in a year.
I am not sure what it is about this major, but for some reason the majority of us have known that we wanted to be a teacher since we were tiny students ourselves. So when you tell us that we should be careful and be sure we know what we are getting ourselves in to, it makes us feel like we should re-think our whole life. Except for it doesn't. We are confident in our choice because we know that we have what it takes to be the love and support that these students need.
There is so much talk these days about the lack of good educators in schools. But we are right here! There are great educators everywhere. You just choose to look at us as if we are silly people who want to babysit for the rest of our life. So next time you talk to someone who tells you that they have decided to go to school for four years in order to become a teacher, simply say thank you. It will mean more to us than you will ever know.
Sincerely,
Education majors everywhere
