Dear Colleague,

In the first year of my teaching career, I was a walking, talking jumble of misguided beliefs and ideas about teaching. Back then, I was the main character of my classroom story—I wouldn’t have told you that or even thought it, but at the bedrock of my soul, there was this vision of me, the hero from the teacher movies, and my students, the secondary characters.

And this point of view made the difficulties in my classroom unbearable. Every classroom management problem became a personal affront. Every poor set of student achievement results threatened my sense of self. And every success was like an intoxicant, drugging me up for a few days until my soul began to thirst for another fix.

It’s no surprise, then, that many of my nights were filled with desperation. Most often, that desperation looked like working harder and harder, staying up later and later, striving to make sure the story kept going the way I wanted it to go.

But then one night—and I can still picture this, twenty years later—I was sitting at the small kitchen table in my apartment with a roster in front of me, looking at the list of student names like an algebra student sitting for a calculus exam. The simile is apt; these students were, to me, more problems to solve than bearers of God’s image. But in a gift of grace that evening, the Lord brought me to the end of my penchant for problem-solving, and I saw only one thing to do: I prayed that God would help me to love my students, to like them. Though I will admit to not being much of a pray-through-lists guy, that night I prayed right through the list, name by name, asking God to help me to love my students.

Today, I can tell you that there is no type of prayer I have found God more eager and reliable to answer. Slow though the transformation has been, it has been a transformation nonetheless. The catalyst has not been me—it has been my students, the natural difficulties of working with young people, and most fundamentally, our Father, who delights in crafting in His children the gift of seeing things as He does.

And so it is not through any direct effort that I’ve come to believe—to know—that teaching is not about me at all. I’m not the main character in my students’ lives, and I don’t seek to be. Rather, if through my teaching I can become a percent of a percent of the reason my students go on to lead lives of shalom, that, to me, is success. If I show up to work tomorrow—with presence, with attention—I can go home and sleep contentedly. 

As I write this, I find myself distracted by a string of difficulties I’ve faced in my personal life this school year. How thankful I am that the goodness of the work of teaching does not rest in the goodness of my year. Regardless of how my life is going, my classroom is a place so much larger than me, and it takes on this size as soon as the first once-in-creation, image-bearing student walks through the door in the morning. They have this nature not because I have willed the faith to see them in that way, but because that is simply what they are. The work was good before this year’s hardships began for me, before I started my career—yes, far before I was born, teaching was good work, and long shall its goodness outlast me. 

And on the mornings when thoughts like these are far from my mind, I’ve found that showing up is the thing to do. Reliably, the truth meets me there, waiting for me alongside our Father.

Teaching right beside you,

Dave Stuart Jr.