There is a long tradition of public service in my family, and perhaps that’s why.

I scored a dozen essays yesterday and my students will all be disappointed with their grades. Nevertheless, they wrote better essays in two weeks than they did in two months just last fall. They haven’t thought much about that yet, but we will talk on Monday after I finish marking up the other dozen essays. They will write a new draft, and if it is not yet as impressive as it might be, we’ll do a draft after that. Each time they work through the process, they become stronger. The essay is less important than their appreciation of the process.

There were a lot of things I could have done with my life. I am a wife and mother, but I did well in college. I was an art major, but I considered law as a career, or botany, or graphic design. I considered other fields, and I worked in several, but eventually I chose teaching as my profession.

My first three years as a teacher were in a private girls prep school east of Seattle. I wasn’t a very good teacher in those days, but I did the best I could as a very young woman in ideal circumstances. My students were elite—the daughters of affluent and actually wealthy parents who already lived in excellent public school districts but who could afford to buy an even better education for their girls. It was and is a great school, but if I’d had daughters I would not have sent them there. I believe in public education.

When my husband and I moved to my family home in Oregon, I had a variety of jobs: working both the back and front of a bakery, drawing plans for a local architect, designing freelance graphics, and for eleven years I was a sub in my local public schools. I worked one or two days a week and in Kindergarten through 12th grade, every subject including high school foreign languages I could not speak, Physics and Calculus, Band and Choir, Resource Room, and P.E. when all the offices and equipment were in the boys locker room. I went to work on those days masquerading as someone else, struggling to keep up for eight hours. I came home exhausted and hopeful I would work the next day too. After a while kids got to know me and my job was a little easier.

There are plenty of important reasons to become a high school teacher. Here are a few:

• You want to teach because you discover you are good at it.
• You want to teach in order to make a difference.
• You want to teach because students deserve to have people in their lives who care about them, teachers who like them, and teachers who have other options that pay better but choose to teach anyway.
• You want to teach because students deserve teachers for whom high school was not the best time of their life—they need to be assured that whoever is telling them that high school is the best time of their life is either lying or has led a very, very sad life indeed.
• You want to teach to make the world a better place, and you want the opportunity to help other people find hope and promise in the world.
• You want to teach to work hard, to engage deeply with ideas and people, and to know that what you do is important.

And the big one we should all care about—

• You want to teach because a strong public education system is the greatest tool for developing democracy that exists. It makes us one people. It makes us known and useful to ourselves and to our communities.

There are, in fact, teachers who do not love their job. Most leave within four years for other work. There are teachers who chose to teach high school because that was the best time of their life while they played sports and they want to hold on to their teenaged dream. There are teachers who do a job, and that is the extent of their commitment. I don’t think that last is anything but rare.

My husband likes to say I am “never off the clock.” Most teachers are like that.

I’ve been a teacher for over forty years. And though a few of them have been very hard, I regret none of those years. I am grateful for a few thousand fascinating people who entered my room and listened to me, who sometimes even laughed at my stupid jokes and teased me, who agreed and disagreed with my opinions, who asked me questions I couldn’t answer, who taught me about baseball and boats, computers and dance, 4-H livestock, music, theater, science, and how very, very hard life is for too many teenagers today. Sometimes I made them angry, I hope more often I gave them the skills and the knowledge that they had a right to expect me to share. I hope I sent them away wanting to be better people and that what they learned in my classroom was useful in that effort. I hope they left possessing greater faith in their own abilities, greater trust in the process and in themselves. I know many of them have been grateful for assignments I gave them that didn’t seem important at the time, but showed their value later.

Teaching is one of the great accomplishments of my life. Most days it makes me proud and hopeful. I hope to keep doing it until I die.

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A follow-up: Less than a month after I wrote this post, I quit teaching in the local school district. I had enjoyed teaching college classes, but in those last months everything became awkward, difficult. I do not regret this decision, though I miss teaching very much. Perhaps I was trying to convince myself of something, because I cannot properly explain my abrupt decision. No one really wanted to know. Why is it that people who are paid a great deal of money to administrate so often fail?

I am not done teaching. It is the great habit of my life, and there are many avenues for pursuing my vocation.

Out of the blue I was recently asked to teach an adult writing workshop next year, and I am looking forward to that. My visual art has been accepted for a show in a local gallery late next year—I had applied on impulse. I look forward to both of these opportunities and home to do well in both.