Thank You, Teachers

For the hours of energy poured into your students over the past nine months–thank you.

For waking up every morning ready to face a new day with people you didn’t create, to teach content you didn’t choose, and to deal with challenges you didn’t foresee–thank you.

For uncounted lesson plans, flashcards, speed drills, phonics sheets, number charts, math formulas, foundational basics, ground rule rubrics, over and over and over again–thank you.

For the lovely classrooms, beautiful bulletin boards, creative ideas for prizes and incentives, poetry appreciation, art lessons, bird watching–thank you.

For looking beyond academics to matters like character and wholeness and the heart–thank you.

For investing in young people, growing our community’s strength, building the church–thank you.

For bearing with questionable lunch manners, for wiping up disgusting substances, for working with people in training, who have not yet mastered some of life’s nuances like which buttons ought to be closed and where to put wadded tissues and what topics are not discussed in polite society–thank you.

For challenging the keen students, tutoring the slow, correcting the naughty, coaching the defiant, meeting the reluctant halfway–thank you.

For setting standards of acceptable behavior, and sticking to them–thank you.

For caring when children injured themselves, fought with their friends, hid tears, went hungry, and lost ground relationally, academically, spiritually–thank you.

For working respectfully with parents who took last-minute trips, who kept a child home when he should have attended and sent him when he should have stayed home, and who contacted you (or not) with varying levels of tact (or not) about their weighty concerns and irrational fears–thank you.

For demonstrating a living picture of Jesus, for modeling Christian virtue, for admitting need, for asking forgiveness after mistakes, for showing what the path to holiness looks like, and for walking it while initiates watched–thank you.

For teaching when you were sick, or struggling, or bone tired, and for waking up the next morning and doing it all again–thank you.

For the hours of energy poured into your students over the past nine months–thank you!