Making a ‘dream’ career change

By Phil Cobb | May 11, 2015 |

Matt Pearl

Most teachers leaving the profession don’t get the chance to send out a general message to their students.

But I do have that opportunity, and I am taking it.

The rest of you may read it, of course, I hope it gives you a little insight into how much these kids mean to me.

So, here it is:

Students, I want you to understand why I began teaching in 2002, and why I have loved it for so many years now.

You are the reason.

When the MAP tests terrified us, we teachers still had all of you to remind us why we continue.

When we began to attend meetings years ago where a set of national standards — a Common Core — became the trend in teaching and testing, we hid our fears to protect you all from seeing our weakness.

My dad was a teacher. My mom is one. My style is a mingling of their influences, as I myself tend to be.

I had Dad’s love for influencing kids, for using my classroom as a forum to teach them lessons that the spur of a single moment could evoke. I wish I had possessed a bit more of Mom’s strict, loving adherence to the lesson.

In the end, I think I might just be too doggone squirrelly to go the distance as a teacher. But my other loves came knocking, you see.

Kids, it’s not that I loved you any less; it’s that I loved my newspaper more than my classroom.

It makes me feel bad to admit such a thing, but it’s the truth.

But I’m going to miss you, going to miss that classroom (which is finally getting air conditioning — just in time for me to depart) more than you can imagine.

I tell you that I am just uptown, and that you can come and see me anytime, and it’s true.

But in four years, the school will be full of kids I never taught, and the students of KCHS will see me as the lanky nerd with the office opposite McCrea’s Grocery.

I won’t miss the educational directives coming down from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

I won’t miss in-services, or committees or waiting for a bell to tell me I can go to the bathroom.

I won’t miss eating in 17 minutes, or grading research papers.

I will miss you, though.

For the first time since 1983, I will not be starting school in the fall. Now that the decision is made and the resignation signed, the finality of the decision has struck me.

I am a slob.

I am disorganized.

My mind is a mess, and my desk is a wreck.

I talk too much, plan too little and never get anything graded on time.

But I am a teacher, and we learned from one another, didn’t we?

Life goes on, I know.

You have more teachers waiting to help you, and I have work to do in my new endeavor. But a part of me will continue to hope I can again teach a student how to speak The Lord’s Prayer in Anglo-Saxon, or enjoy it when a students sees an image pattern in Hamlet.

Life sometimes makes us choose, and I chose.

Thank you for being my students, and God bless you.

And to the King City community, which has entrusted the educational needs of its children to me for nearly a decade, I thank you as well.

Your kids have been great ones—even the more ornery ones in the bunch who tried their best to get under my skin.

They did, but I laugh about it now.

Teaching is a pretty good gig, thanks to wonderful students.