Mom worked for decades in a school with about 25 teachers. She saw them every day. Like many of us professionally, she out-survived a number of "bosses" (aka school principals).
Did you have to be open to change as a teacher?
I asked perhaps with a stereotype in my head: so many years of the same routine in the same walls, the same bells ringing to change class at the same time, the same teachers in the lunchroom, the same school cook in the school cafeteria. Only the kids changed and then again maybe they act the same at the same age, too.
"You have to change as a teacher," she said. "We would get new curriculums or change from one text book to another." It started with bringing in standardized testing. And then more change was coming. You might have to learn something new in order to teach it. To study more. To take a class. To listen to someone else speak. (Teachers don't like to be taught by a speaker apparently. They prefer to be talking in front of their own captive classrooms.) "They are the worst people in a meeting ever," Mom added. "There will always be five over on the side talking the whole time," At least in corporate meetings we are trained in the good manners of acting like we are listening.
The beginning was always the hardest. Frustrating. "Sometimes I would just have to walk out in the hallway, stomp around and walk back in again." If you are not going to do that, keep walking back in and trying again, you are just going to be more unhappy. You are going to have a harder time. Every aspect of life has change.
And (I can say from real experience with Mom, it often comes back to this...) a person needs a good sense of humor through the whole thing. "I mean, really, keep candy in your desk."
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