Bad Days

“If you are a person of an inner path,

            then you

are a person of peace, so make peace with

yourself and your surroundings.”

                                                       Ezzeddin Nasafi*

We all have bad days at work, even the lucky people who love their jobs, like me.  One of the hard things about being a teacher is that to be really good, you have to make yourself vulnerable.  This means that we commit heart and soul to the work and are open to a particular tenderness when we feel we have lost the confidence of a student, a colleague, or a parent, even when our work has been the best it could be.  I have known many teachers who truly suffer when this happens: sleepless nights, lack of appetite, even tears.  Anguish is not an exaggeration.  Sadly, some folks take advantage of this vulnerability in teachers, yet people still stay in the profession because the rewards outweigh those bad days.

The best advice I ever received for coping with those inevitable downs came from one of the wisest educators I know, my boss for many years and the person who first gave me the book with the Nasafi poem.  Kate always reminded me to look for the best, to find the solution that would work most optimally for the student, the person for whom we really work.  I think that in doing so, we satisfy our core beliefs and motivations, the reason many of us are teachers in the first place.  We love teaching and education. 

Bad days are always going to be a part of life, in teaching, any other profession, and in our personal lives.  We can try to find peace by acknowledging and accepting this inevitability.  We can quiet turmoil by sometimes letting go of our own egos to allow others help us with the work, or at other times by just lifting our chins, putting on a smile, and stepping forward to strive toward the best solutions.  Luckily for teachers, to see that light in a child’s eyes on another day can make that bad day, just a memory.

* Nasafi, Ezzeddin. "Oh, my friend."  Intractor, Sam M. and Scribner, Megan, Eds.  Leading from Within: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Lead 135.