Choosing to be happy this year (repost)

Hello! I posted this on a FB group I use and I’d like to share here too for anyone looking for a pick me up. <br><br>**There is a wonderful, smart, funny, creative man I know who has just started his 25th year of teaching. What an incredible achievement! He’s also one of the most positive people I know. I asked him how he did it and here is what he said. I think we all need to hear this today.YC **<br><br>I believe that the choice to be happy is important. I admire people who can remain optimistic in the face of tough times, but as an opponent of school reform, I knew I had to pick my battles. The answer came in 2011.<br><br>The negative narrative around schools and teachers was only strengthening. The media seemed to take pleasure in beating us down. I, like many, felt frustrated. I’m not a big guy and I’ve never been one to argue, but that didn’t stop me from telling anyone who would listen what I thought was wrong with the way schools, students, and teachers were being treated. I would argue with family and friends who worked in medicine, engineering, law, and business, who had never set foot in a classroom. I would argue with them about who was at fault for the perceived shortcomings of our education system.<br><br>I did this until I realized that the audience wasn’t listening to me. They didn’t want to know about the issues that I cared so deeply about. They would nod along and I would get frustrated that they just didn’t get it. This was also teaching year nine for me and it was an unreal amount of work with an unfamiliar curriculum and a totally new audience to try to reach. This was when I sat down and wrote myself a memo.<br><br>“I choose to be happy. I choose to be happy. I choose to be happy.”<br><br>I put a copy on my fridge at home. I put one in the first page of my planning book. I put one on my desk at school, and, I put one on the first page of my students’ agendas so I could ask them to read it to me when I needed to remind myself to be happy.<br><br>What this exercise taught me, was that, by and large, the people I thought were the root of the problem, weren’t the problem at all. The problem existed between my ears. I was the problem. I choose to let it bother me so much. I was choosing to be unhappy and to let the negativity of others bring me down. That was on me. <br><br>So I chose to be happy.<br><br>I am still a vocal opponent of school reform, but I am not nearly as confrontational. I still see all the things that are wrong, but now I focus more on what’s right. I do still struggle with the paperwork and teaching students to write a good five-paragraph essay, but I also focus on the things that bring me joy. <br><br>There has never been a good time to be a teacher in the history of humanity. In the beginning, there was no one to teach. Now there are too many students and not enough teachers. We will never be paid a salary commensurate with our training, so we might as well learn to love this work. I choose to be happy.