Here’s A Message To The World: Written By My 7th and 8th Grade Students
By: Laura Gulbranson
Tags: Self Improvement, Inspiration, Equality, Education, Life Lessons

There’s still hope.

As adults, we often forget how much hope there truly exists in our current state of the world or even in the future generation. Of course, we can’t forget the realities of this world. Our lives are deluged with a wide array of challenges which always seem to grow into larger-than-life mammoths in our minds.

My last year of teaching as a public school teacher felt bittersweet and as much of a mammoth of a challenge. There were still so many things I had told myself I would improve on before I finished my last year.

Things like management and consistency.

It felt like Abba’s ballad of The Winner Takes It All as I admitted defeat at the end of the year though.

I wasn’t the teacher I wanted to be for my students. Or so I thought. I made a self-imposed ditch for myself. I fell into unhealthy habits of inconsistencies. The hole got deeper as I silently tried to claw at the edges.

In the classroom, I felt like I was grasping loose soil every time I tried to climb up from the foreboding ditch that I swore to myself that I would never return to.

I witnessed moments of utter tears, crying at least three times my first year teaching, once the second year, and at least twice the third year.

I reveal this to you, because many teachers might tell you:

Not to show weakness to your students. They feed off of it. You either become prey or a walking doormat in the classroom.

Teaching is a challenging profession as is any when you are dealing with actual people’s lives and the growing and changing brains of adolescents.

As a public school teacher, I saw the best and worst in my students. But I also saw the best and worst in myself. In this duality, there was beauty found.

At the start, the duality of seeing my students on their best behavior in some classes, and then coming in relaxed but like laughing hyenas into my classroom was a shock to the system. In those moments, I was more preoccupied with disturbing the teachers in the other rooms. I was worried about self-image, rather than trying to carve out the most authentic approach I could take as a teacher: being myself with my students.

It really came down to this: consistency.

But I let the mammoth in my mind overrule all reason and even let it pervade who I was as a person.

It wasn’t simply mismanagement that took a hit to my spirit.

To hear the gossip and negativity that would recycle over and over again in the lounge room due to the state of a failed system was draining. The complaining and unchanging complacency was like a contagion even when there were teachers who held for dear life to the seed of hope to motivate themselves for their students.

I felt depression’s weight, boulders upon my shoulders. I couldn’t shut out the negativity around me. The depression of the system haunted me where ever I would go— a nagging feeling of needing to do more and failing my students and colleagues. It followed me to bed into slumber.

What I really needed was change to overcome this depression.

I needed to change and grow if I wanted to see a positive transformation in myself and in the classroom.

The last year was hard, but I did go through changes even despite the moments when I felt my spirit and heart break numerous times.

It was also the time that I realized that it wasn’t that I was a terrible teacher.

I was just flawed, and like anyone, in need of improvement.

By the end of my third year teaching, I had changed to grow into my authenticity. I stopped ignoring the inner voice that told me what I should be doing all along.

The enemy in my mind would tell me it was due to my ineffeciency and defect as a teacher that I changed gears in my profession, but the real truth is this:

I was choosing to serve and add value to people in the world in the best way I knew that I could: as a writer, as a learner, and as a servant through teaching one-on-one and in small groups.

I don’t regret serving in the public school system for three years. There was a purpose and a great one at that…

I was there to learn from my students — to grow together through the best of times and worst of times. Through laughter and tears. Through heartbreak and hope.

We learned. At least I would like to say that we did… but I will show you instead.

This is a message to the world. Brought to you by my 7th and 8th grade students of the 2018–2019 year.

Read and be inspired. :)