Choosing Contentment by Christina Knowles

I have decided to like my job. It just seems easier and far more pleasant than hating it. I am a high school English teacher, and I absolutely love my subject and really love and enjoy teenagers. But lately, the insane expectations placed upon teachers by the government, the critical blame-laying on teachers, the lack of accountability on students, the absence of respect for the profession, the inability to obtain fair compensation, and the sheer magnitude of the workload all soured me on my vocation. With all that weighing on me, it is all too easy to forget what I love about it. However, having fourteen years invested in this career and a huge student loan debt, I cannot just change careers or quit. Furthermore, I am a person who likes to be happy, and focusing on these negative, albeit real, aspects of my job won’t really get me there. I choose to be content, regardless of my circumstances. The best way to attain contentment is to be grateful for the wonderful things we have. With that in mind, here are the things I love about being an English teacher:

• Reading: I love literature, just about every genre and time period. I read for enjoyment, and I read to learn new things or to understand things more deeply. I love to analyze it, speculate about it, interpret it, talk about it, and criticize it. I get to do this in my profession almost every day.
• Writing: I love to write–fiction, non-fiction, poetry, anything. Most of us forget a lot of what we learned in college if we don’t use it, but teaching a writing class allows me to keep up good habits and practice the techniques I teach my students. Teaching keeps what I learned fresh in my mind and ready to use in my personal writing. I also love teaching my students what I know about writing and seeing their talent and creativity flourish. My creative writing students love my encouragement and get so excited about their writing. This enthusiasm is contagious and helps me to want to write every day as well. Right now my creative writing students and I are working on compiling short stories for a class anthology that we intend to publish as a free ebook. I love these kids. I feel like we are kindred spirits when I work with them.
• Grammar and Vocabulary: These are often considered to be the drudgery of English class, but I love them. I enjoy diagramming sentences and figuring out really difficult grammar questions. Learning new words along with the students is a benefit of my job. Having a large vocabulary makes me a better writer. It also just makes me feel intelligent. I like that feeling.
• Argument and Reasoning: Discussing rhetoric, logical fallacies, and philosophical thought are extremely satisfying activities I am able to include in my lessons. One of my favorite things about my job is the journal topic discussion I have with my science fiction literature class every day. We discuss important and controversial philosophical, political, moral, and social issues daily. The students can voice any opinion they have as long as they can logically defend it. They love it, and so do I. Again, kindred spirits. All of my classes learn to logically support their arguments. Logic is good. I feel like it makes the world a better place. The world could use more logic.
• Academic and Professional Environment: Working with an intelligent group of people who are all educated in the same discipline is a stimulating experience. There is never a lack of informed conversation, and we all are eager to help each other and share our ideas. The people in my department are a lot of fun as well. There is never a lack of clever author quotes, puns, double entendres, or witty aphorisms. We even take our practical jokes to the next level, academically, of course. Over lunch we dissect our favorite shows, such as The Walking Dead, and analyze them for plot and character development, and of course, thematic significance. What else would you expect from a room full of English teachers?

When we have to work evenings, with the exception of parent-teacher conferences, it is usually to supervise a concert, a play, attend a sporting event, or to participate in fun activities with the students, such as our Jeopardy-like competition, Knowledge Bowl. Working late is a regular occurrence for teachers, but I have to say it’s not as bad as other jobs I’ve had.

• Students: I left this one until almost the end because it is truly the second most loved aspect of my job. I love my students. Well, most of them. I’d have to say that out of five classes, I have only a handful of students who are really a pain. Every year I think that my students are the best I ever had. Every year I meet such sweet, kind, funny, and engaging kids. They make me laugh and smile every day. I miss them when they graduate, and we often keep in touch, sometimes becoming good friends in their adulthood. I have to admit that they really do bring joy into my life, and I hope I do the same for them.
  
• Breaks, Snow Days, and Holidays: The absolute best thing about my job! I work in a district with a modified year-round schedule, so I get two weeks off for fall break in October, two weeks off for Christmas break, two weeks off for spring break, and about six weeks off for summer (the students get eight, but teachers usually have training, staff development, and start a week early to get ready for the year). We don’t get paid for this time, but it is so worth it and necessary. I honestly could never do my job without this recovery time. But mostly, I need it to write, which is my passion. I don’t know of any other job for which I would be qualified that would allow me this uninterrupted stretch where I can focus totally on my personal writing consistently for several weeks at a time. A lot of teachers travel during the breaks, but I use it to work on my novels and spend more time with my husband.

Snow days are gifts from Heaven throughout the winter in Colorado. The thing I love most about snow days is that they are totally unexpected days off. I don’t have any plans, nothing I was counting on doing at home, so it really is a day off. If I take a day off, it is always to get something done, but a snow day is perfect for watching movies or reading with no guilt–and no sub plans! The worst thing about taking a day off when you are a teacher is planning for a substitute, and then coming back and finding that they didn’t do anything you asked, and now you are behind. I do have to admit, though, I often grade papers on snow days to catch up, but the beauty is that I don’t have to. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be any worse off than if I had to work. In addition to that, we get all the major holidays off with pay. Having worked retail in the past, I can really appreciate this benefit. Without breaks, I don’t think any teacher could endure the rigor and demands of the job. At many low times in my career, the thought of upcoming breaks was the only thing that kept me from quitting.

So there you have it, or should I say, there I have it? After all, this was really about convincing me that I love my job in order to obtain contentment in my life. I think it worked! I really do. Focusing on the positive is more than a mind trick. The good things in life are always there all the time. They just become obscured when we pile on the negativity so thickly that we can no longer see through the dark haze we created. I don’t mean we actually create the negative things–oh, they’re really there, believe me. But we don’t have to let them obliterate the beauty and joy that is also there. At least I choose not to, not anymore. Life is too valuable and wonderful to live like that, so from now on, I choose contentment.–Christina Knowles