Episode 07: Thank You

I was listening to Michelle Obama on a podcast earlier this week, on Tuesday, while I commuted to work.

She says: “A good teacher, a person who is a good teacher, can have as great if not a greater impact on the world than the President of the United States. To me that’s how change happens.”

This jolted me. Deeply. Because earlier that morning I read about yet another horrific school shooting in Nashville Tennessee - a shooting in a school.

In a school. The places where teachers, alongside our world’s children, go to do their invaluable, life changing, world changing work. The safety of these places shattered by violence, of which is deeply politicized - in a way that is shocking. Hard to wrap our hearts and minds around.

I want to acknowledge that I am not well-read on matters of gun violence, gun control, school shootings. Right here, right now, I am compelled by a very, seemingly simple, observation. A noticing. The starkness of it jarring.

I think about my teacher friends, family, the people I know and love deeply that work in schools every single day. I think about parents. I think about kiddos. It’s hard to know what to do, how to help.

In the podcast, Michelle also talks about how in her life experience, change happens when we look at what we can control, where we can influence, what we can directly impact. So, putting that into practice right now, I’m thinking about this big, scary, horrifying reality we are confronted with in gun violence and school shootings and taking it down into this post - this writing. What I have the ability to do right now. To influence directly and immediately. Even though it doesn’t feel like close to enough.

So, here’s a moment to acknowledge.

To acknowledge the horrifying, painful, devastating events we read about, and that some of us have to actually experience/live/endure.

To acknowledge educators - the undervalued, life changing, world changing work that educators all over the world do day in and day out.

To acknowledge parents - the work of parents to raise and shape the next generations of human beings out there changing our world (WOAH).

To acknowledge mental health professionals - the work of mental health professionals to support us as we navigate countless challenges, hard to imagine challenges, of all shapes and sizes.

Here’s to educators. To parents. To therapists.

You are doing hard work. Unglamorous, often thankless, but irrevocably irreplaceable, invaluable work. The work that people don’t talk about, nearly enough. The most important work.

Thank you.