There are some days I want to quit. Everyone, even the best of us, have these days every now and again.
One of my favorite movies ever is A League of Their Own. While the movie depicts a women’s baseball team and two sisters and their struggles, I’ve always connected with the movie from the standpoint of the passion necessary to really persevere through adversity when something you love gets difficult. I don’t play baseball, but I do love my profession and it’s not always easy. Some days are frustrating and I feel like it would be so much easier to quit and find something else where I could go to work 9am-5pm and go home and enjoy my family without giving my job another thought. In my frustration, inevitably, two quotes from this movie will pop into my head.
The first: “There’s no crying in baseball.” The scene reminds me that complaining and crying will do nothing to help the situation. Planning, action, and utilizing the strengths I’ve been given are more likely to produce the results I want to fix whatever is frustrating me.
The second: “Baseball is what gets inside you, what lights you up. You can’t deny that…it’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”
Perhaps one of the greatest movie lines ever.
Again, I don’t play baseball, but I do work in one of the greatest professions of all time. There isn’t a single day that we go to work where we don’t make a difference (hopefully positive) in someone’s life. It’s also one of the most difficult jobs. We work in a human profession, yet some people manage to take the humanism out of it. We work with people who claim to have our best interest at heart, but then they only look at the bottom line. We might even be surrounded by people that have forgotten why they’re here in the first place. For them, it might have just gotten too hard.
But it’s the hard that makes it great. If teaching were easy, everyone would do it.
Many of us think that we have chosen our profession, but really, the profession chose us, and while we do work with some of the people mentioned above, we also are fortunate enough to work with some of the greatest, most passionate and dedicated people on the planet. We are here for a reason, and when it gets difficult is when we need to summon the passion that we have for students, learning, and making a difference and use that as our reason to keep moving forward. We all could go out there and find that 9am-5pm job that allows us some peace of mind at night, more stress free days, and regular times to use the restroom. But, that’s not where our passion led us, and sometimes it might not be easy, but our kids will always be worth it.
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