A Letter to My Younger Self

Dear Ms. Chapa,

This is your first year of teaching and you are a nervous wreck.  Don't be!  Those 23 first graders will love you and by the last day of school, you will love them more than you thought possible.  You will cry.  You will cry big crocodile tears the last week of school because you had no idea how much they would steal your heart, how you would realize that you spent more time with them each day than their parents, but yet may not ever know what will happen to their future.

Twenty-five years from now, you will still think about many of them and know them by name.  You will be friends with some of them on this crazy thing called Facebook.  It's social media and impossible to explain to you because you don't even know what email is.  But through this thing called Facebook, you will know that one of your very first students is successfully living her dreams in New York, others are getting married, earning their masters, or graduating nursing school.  How cool is that!

As you grow as a teacher, don't sweat the small stuff.  You will touch the lives of hundreds of students.  You will teach first grade, second grade, fourth grade, and pre-K.  You will be a Gifted and Talented Specialist and teach the most amazing kindergarten through fifth grade students, until one day you make a wild decision to teach high school English.  Can you believe it?  You will go full circle to where you thought you wanted to teach in the first place.  But the astonishing thing about all of this is that YOU.ARE.A.PROFESSIONAL.EDUCATOR and YOU make a difference.

Without even intentionally planning on it, you will develop into a master teacher. Not only will you influence your own students, but you will lead teachers to be even better.  You will make friends with parents of students, and they will thank you for loving their babies, challenging their babies, and accepting their babies, and then you won't.  You will have some parents, and some students, who don't get you at all; and that's okay.  When you become a high school teacher, some even may even want to kill you.  Don't dwell on the ones who don't appreciate you, because so many more will, and do.  And the rest of them, well, one day they will know  that every decision you made, you made with their best interests in mind.

Teach from your heart every day.  You will be rewarded.  You will be exhausted.  You will be grateful.  You will be grateful that you chose this career because it completes you.  One day, far into your teaching career, one of those exhausting days when you are questioning your decisions,  you will get an unexpected note from a former student revealing how you helped them believe in themselves, and their intelligence.  Another day you will be sitting alone contemplating how to reach the difficult ones, when a sweet former student will bring you a coffee.  And you will know.  You will know that no matter how hard it is, educating children is what makes you who you are.

Enjoy your first year.  It only gets better, but whatever you do, don't sweat the small stuff, and don't put your hands out when a kid complains of a stomach ache.  Teaching can be messy after all.

P.S.  You won't always be Mrs. Chapa.  You will become Miss Jobson again, and then Mrs. Pogue.  You will become a mom and find that the teacher/mom struggle is real!  Hard stuff will happen in your personal life, but no one will be the wiser.  You are stronger than you know.  You will get you through it.  And seriously, don't sweat the small stuff.