​Little Moments in the First Few Weeks

Last Thursday, Archbishop Naumann commissioned the students of Christ the King to
learn something new every day: as students, this is why they come to school. What it has taken
me many years to realize–and has been made especially clear over the past two and a half
weeks–is that this is the role of each and every one of us, including teachers! As a first year
teacher, it is consistently becoming clearer and clearer to me that I will always be a student; I am
always going to be learning how to be better and that can become stressful and
overwhelming–perfection is a daunting goal! I have heard consistently that teaching is an art; it
is something that you can hone and practice and get better at it. What I find myself telling my
students, however, in these first few weeks of school is this: I know none of you are perfect, and
I know that I will never be perfect. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try!
Before I started teaching, I thought it was going to be constant, engaged learning, where I
impart knowledge to the students, and they receive it with thirsty minds, eager for more with
perfect, focused attention. Maybe that was just a little ambitious. Just in these early weeks, I have
found it to be most of the time the exact opposite: I feel that I correct more than I teach, the
classroom falls into messy chaos, some students STILL forget to write their names on their
papers, and by the end of the day I am completely exhausted. But, at the end of the day,
intertwined with all the tiredness and mess is precisely the reason that I wake up in the morning
to come right back: my love for the students and the brilliant human beings that they are. In such
a short time, there have been so many little moments with each and every one of my4th grade
students that have made me understand why teachers spend forty years of their lives waking up
and coming back to school every single day. And it’s the smallest things that give me fuel for
when the hard things happen; it’s the pictures already beginning to cover the classroom walls, it’s
the eager faces showing me their completed assignments, it’s watching a student finally grasp a
concept and understand, it’s the unexpected perfect behavior from the loudest children, and it’s
the consistent good behavior from the quiet ones. It’s seeing their excited hands flapping in the
air, because they know the answer! And it’s getting to see their faces every single morning as
they walk into the classroom.
If nothing else, the first few weeks of school have taught me that, contrary to what I
thought coming in, being a teacher is not just about teaching. It’s so much more personal than
that. Being a teacher is not about the money, or the experience, or the advantages; it’s about the
students. They make a classroom, not a teacher. I had four empty walls and a lot of empty chairs
before this school year started. Now, two and a half weeks in, I’ve got 25 more faces to love than
I did before. I am so beyond blessed to have each and every one of them, and I am so excited to
see what little moments the rest of the year holds.

Kate Kirstein