My mom was a music teacher at a local middle school for 17.5 years, and has been the guidance counselor there going on 8.5 years now. She loves what she does, she does it well, and the kids she works with love her. I’ve always thought that having a mom who is a teacher was pretty cool, especially as a little kid – I always hoped the “what do your parents do?” conversation would start so I could proudly announce my mother’s career in education and watch the other kids and teachers nod in approval. I didn’t realize it back then, but there are some aspects of growing up with an educator for a mother that made my life different from that of my peers. Here are just a few of them:
1. Not Being Able To go Anywhere Without Someone Recognizing Her.
I know this is something that seems to happen with a lot of parents, but it is WAY worse with my mom. No matter where we go, she seems to know at least one person. While we may only run into one or two people we know at any given place we go, we can never shop at the Wal-Mart in the town where my mom teaches because it is almost guaranteed that we will run into a handful of people (students, former-students, parents of students, co-workers, etc.) who know my mother and want to stop and talk to her, which is nice of them but also fairly annoying when we’re just trying to buy a bottle of shampoo and some cereal. But what is easily most irritating and tiring about this situation is having to ask after walking away from every single person, “who was that one?” because I only ever knew about one out of every dozen people who talked to my mother, if that.
2. Being Held To A Higher Standard.
My mom always expected me to do my absolute best in school. If my grades were not good enough, I was in huge trouble because she knew it was not the teacher’s fault if I wasn’t doing as well as I should have been. And if I ever acted up and got a call/email home or a detention, it was 30 times worse for me than it would’ve been for any of my friends at home. My mother was mortified anytime I got in trouble at school for doing something stupid because she knew what it was like to be a teacher and didn’t want mine to have to deal with behavioral issues from me when there were other kids there whose parents never taught them how to act giving the teachers a hard time too.
3. Understanding That Teachers Are People Too.
Since my mom was a teacher, I never held that common delusion that teachers have no lives outside of school. It was never weird for me to run into one of my teachers outside of the classroom, especially because we ran into my mom’s students so often, and I always wanted to know what they were like in real life. I grew up with a sort of affinity toward all teachers that my classmates seemed to lack. I became close to a lot of my teachers throughout school, and I think the fact that I always understood them as normal human beings had a big hand in my ability and desire to do that.
4. Knowing How The System Works.
My mother was always ready to fire off an email or make a phone call when she believed I wasn’t being treated as well as I could have been by the school system, especially while I was in high school. Being in education herself, she generally knew what could and should be done and what could and should not in most situations. For example, when I had scheduling conflicts due to my being in a large number of singletons, she made sure those issues were resolved in a way that did not involve me having to choose between honors classes and electives that I cared about because she knew how scheduling worked from being in charge of it at her own school. This makes me wonder what happened when the many kids who weren’t so lucky as to have a parent who understood and took action on their behalf when something went wrong in school. From my mom, I also learned just how much politicking goes on behind the scenes in schools – I found out early on about things like hiring coaches as teachers because it’s often cheaper even though they may make subpar educators or negotiating contracts that may result in the district’s staff going on strike. So much goes on behind the scenes that a lot of people never realize, and I always appreciated having a mother who understood the inner-workings of the system and who imparted a little of that knowledge upon myself.
5. Realizing That The Government Treats The Public Schools Horrendously.
From talking about work and politics with my mom for so many years, I have come to realize that the laws being passed continually make life more difficult for educators and administrators in public schools. The amazing lack of funding and governmental institutions like school vouchers, Common Core, standardized testing, and No Child Left Behind make running and working in public schools much harder than it should be, considering how important the education that schools are providing everyone is in life. I can get pretty heated when talking about education issues, and I’m sure my passion in this area has a good deal to do with my mom.
6. Coming To The Conclusion That I Couldn’t Do It.
I wanted to be a teacher. I did when I was a little kid and people first started asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I did in high school when the question became more serious. There is a part of me that still does. Why am I going to school for history and English instead of an education degree? I realized after watching my mom for my whole life that being in public education is really hard, and that it is only getting harder. She absolutely loves her job, but often it is emotionally and physically draining due to dealing with troubled or misbehaving students while standing in front of a class all day, frustrating due to administration or government mishandling of situations, and often thankless due to having students and bosses that don’t always recognize how much their teachers do every day. The first reaction you will almost always get from an educator if you tell them you want to become a teacher is, “Don’t be a teacher.” My mom was not an exception. This isn’t because teachers don’t like what they do, but because of how tough of a job it really is. Not everyone is cut out to be an educator, and I realized that I’m not sure I’m one of those amazing people who is.
