Teachers are not super heroes.
Though I know some who are VERY close.
No, we’re not faster than a speeding bullet. (Wow, this hits me in my feelings as I think about the active shooter drills I have to practice with my students each year.)
We’re not more powerful than a locomotive.
We’re not able to leap tall buildings at a single bound.
You’ll never say, “Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a TEACHER!”
No, we’re not super heroes.
Though we’d like to be.
We’d love to have the super power to instantly help kids read above grade level AND love reading.
We’d love to have the super power to help kids learn complicated math with one example.
We’d love to have the super power to help kids write about a small moment in their lives that would become #1 on the NY Times best seller list and stun the literary world with it’s insight and language.
(You can tell I’d REALLY love to have that super power, huh?)
But we can’t.
You know what, though?
Teachers may not be super heroes, but TEACHING is HEROIC.
This is what I mean by that.
Teachers show up every day and…
Spend extra time teaching our students who are below grade level how to read and how to choose books they love to read
Show students many strategies over and over for how to solve a difficult math problem
Listen to the stories of students lives and help them share those stories with each other (thus growing empathy in their hearts)
This heroic teaching changes our students.
It changes us.
It changes the world.
We may not be super heroes.
But we have grit.
And grit, as MacArthur Fellow Angela Duckworth says, is POWER.
The power of PASSION.
The power of PERSEVERENCE.
That’s the power we have.
That makes teaching heroic.
Grit.
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