Dear Future Teacher,

I know how much you’re struggling right now. I know that you’re wondering why you’re still here. You ask yourself each and every day if you made the right decision in pursuing a career in education. You wake up at 7 a.m after staying up until 3 a.m. studying for those three exams you have that day. You pretty much live in the education section of your campus library working on projects and reading countless children’s books while trying to connect them with complicated standards that no one understands. You wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night when you realize you have a paper due tomorrow that you completely forgot about. You spend your weekends and vacations writing lesson plans you’ll rarely use and scoping Pinterest to find the perfect crafts to go along with them. These are all stressful tasks Oklahoma education majors (actually, all education majors for that matter) struggle with on a daily basis.

So why do we do it? Why do we continue to wake up two hours early each morning, put on our “teacher clothes,” grab our third cup of coffee and walk out our door into the humid air and head to our 8 a.m. class? This is a question I ask myself at least three times a week; it’s also a question that many “non-education affiliates” ask on a daily basis. Let me tell you my answer.

All children deserve an education; regardless of whether they live in Oklahoma or at the North Pole. They deserve someone to teach them their ABC’s and to teach them who the 17^th president of the United States was. They need someone who will walk them to the lunch room and give them a band-aid when they fall and scrape their knee. They need someone who will love them endlessly and will not throw in the towel when they “don’t get it.” They need you.

As future teachers, it is our job to make sure that they have that person. It is our job to make sure they have someone to give them an affectionate “Good morning Jeremy!” or “Have a good day! I’ll see you tomorrow!” You might very well be the only kind face they see every day and you might provide the only positive connotation of their name that they hear.

Some of your students won’t have a good home life, they may not even have food to eat. They come to school and impatiently scarf down the only warm meal they’ve had since last week. They come to school sleepy and with their shoes on the wrong feet because they dressed themselves that morning.

So there’s your answer; that’s why we do it. Those students are the reason I get up two hours early every morning, put on my “teacher clothes,” grab my third cup of coffee and walk out my door into the humid Oklahoma air and head to my 8 a.m. class. They are the reason I am still pursuing a career in education even though the government just put back millions of dollars to improve our state capital that was just recently repaired and offered a member of a basketball team a jumpstart to his political career if he would remain in Oklahoma. Those students are the reason I spend hundreds of dollars each month on pieces of colored wax that will just end up broken and smeared onto paper as pictures you can’t identify.

For those of you reading this that are education majors living in Oklahoma, I hope this gives you a reason to stay. A reason to continue losing sleep to study for exams you know you’re going to fail and doing projects you doubt you’ll ever use. If you ever believe that you’re unappreciated, let me tell you this: throughout your lifetime, you will teach hundreds of students, those hundreds of students will laugh with you, they’ll cry with you and they’ll argue with you, but more than any of those, your students will love you. You’ll watch students grow and prosper and you’ll see lightbulbs go off when they finally grasp a concept you’ve been working on for weeks. You’ll fall in love with education all over again.

For those of you reading this that aren’t education majors or teachers, you should know that your comments such as: “Don’t you know you won’t make any money? You should move to Texas. They make loads of money there.” Or “You just threw away $35,000 to be a teacher? Are you crazy?” are taken to heart by every young teacher. We didn’t throw away our money to be “just teachers.” We “threw it all away” to be educators, parents, friends, counselors and to give your kids a chance to grow up with a knowledgeable background and the opportunity to grow and thrive with a better future.