Year 11 – Week 31: What Being A Parent Has Taught Me About Teaching

There are times when I think about how much easier it would be to handle my job as a teacher if I didn't have children. I'd have so much more time on my hands. I wouldn't be distracted by concerns and thoughts about my children while I was teaching, and I would be free of the constant tension of balancing out my work life and my role as a parent.

I don't remember my life as a teacher being a whole lot easier when I didn't have children. I didn't feel like I had enough time at work, my home life had stress as well, and there was the tension between me wanting to do stuff for work and doing things outside of my work life. In retrospect, this seems silly knowing how much more time I had for myself during those years, but at the time, I didn't appreciate this.

Often, we don't enjoy how much easier life is at a certain moment until that moment is passed and we are in a different life situation.

There are so many things that are hard about being a teacher while having young children of my own at home, but there are also benefits.

Having children has helped me find emotional space from my work and my students. When I was a younger teacher, I put more emotional energy into my relationship with my students. While I still care about them and work hard to get to know them, I'm not invested in them emotionally in a way that I feel that I need reciprocation. Sometimes teachers get too emotionally involved with students, and there were times when I was a younger teacher when things students would say would really hurt my feelings, and it would stay with me all weekend. Now, those things don't stay with me as much. I'm just their teacher. I'm not their parent, and my emotional energy is better served on my children.

Having children has forced me to work smarter. I have less time to focus on work than ever before in my career as a teacher. This means that not everything gets done on my to-do list, and not everything I want to do can be done. Now how is this a good thing? Sometimes teachers try to do too much. As a music teacher who puts on concerts, my own personal ambitions sometimes get mixed up with what is best for my students. When you have less, sometimes doing less for a concert means more of this work is on the students, representing their work more authentically.

When I was a younger teacher, I would make arrangements for most of the songs that I taught. I don't have time to do this anymore. So now I have to use other people's arrangements, and shock and awe, there are many great educators and composers out there who are better than me at making arrangements. My ego has been tempered through the need to rely on other people's work, and that's not a bad thing. Being a great teacher is not about doing everything yourself for your students. It's about creating the best educational experience possible for your students. If that means that you use people's work from a music method book does the job better than you could. Great!

Having children has helped me understand that being that teaching is of the most important jobs in society, and being a teacher is not the most important thing in my life.

My two older children's teachers, including their wonderful therapist, have significantly influenced Ollie and Ethan. Their self-esteem, their love of learning, and the light in their eyes have all been nurtured and have all grown because of their outstanding teachers. I will forever be grateful for all of the teachers who have given so much to my children. Their devotion to my children is inspiring, and an affirmation of all that is good and beautiful in this world. As a parent, I know how important great teachers are to children, families, and the world.

I love being a teacher, and I feel blessed and privileged to be engaged in the wonderful work of educating students, but I'm a father first. I join other fathers like President Obama, who hold their identity as a father ahead of their jobs as being central to who they are as people.

At some point, when I leave my current job, they will hire someone to replace me. No one can replace my role as a father in my children's lives. As we better understand our own lives, we can bring more of our authentic selves to our students, which makes us more effective at the practice of teaching.