Being responsible for the quality of a child’s education is a difficult task to pursue, especially when planning to do it for the rest of your career. Although teacher appreciation week is celebrated, thanking these people who have dedicated their lives to helping kids on their journey to the real world is something that should be done as often as possible.

It is reasonable to say that teaching, in the U.S. at least, is not commonly categorized as a very demanding job. Although this is far from the truth, this may be due to the fact that people often think of occupations such as lawyers or doctors as being extremely sought after because of the analytical capabilities that they require. Teaching may not require the same skills as those highly desirable professions, but nonetheless, it does require certain skills that many people do not possess in their lifetime.

Take elementary teachers, for example. While one part of their job involves playing games, doing arts and crafts and singing songs, the other part is seemingly overwhelming to even think about. They have to answer the awkward questions, they have to suffer the headaches of days filled with yelling children, they have to teach entirely clueless little humans about things that are as second nature as breathing by the time of adulthood. There’s a reason people respond with “Oh, I could never do that” when told by someone that they are an elementary school teacher, because it is a job that not many could handle. Especially in recent times, when kids have come back to school after the pandemic with noticeable discipline problems. It can’t be easy to have to be the first person in a child’s life to tell them “No.”

Then comes the adolescent years of middle school and high school. True, most kids by this age know how to tie their shoes by themselves and that it’s bad to pull each other’s hair, but teaching people at this age presents its own difficulties. Now, the issue is not answering dumb questions, well, maybe it is still a little bit of that. The frustration of the job now stems from repeating the same sentence three times because it is apparently not common courtesy to listen to someone when they are speaking to you. Teaching kids at this age is being given the task of getting them through their last few years of childhood and preparing them for their first few years of adulthood. It requires immense patience, dedication, level-headedness and emotional intelligence.

Teachers are the people that help us all throughout our life, they are the people that contribute to everyone’s success. Teachers are the people that introduce us to our future passions and encourage us to live up to our truest potential. Let us not forget the necessity of them in our lives and let us pay our respect back to them through our character.