I don’t know how other jobs work. When you start a new job, do you have time to ease in? Are there people around who can set aside their own tasks to walk you through things you don’t know? Are you joining a team with a defined role, or are you a new member of a group defining your own role?

I don’t know how other jobs work.

I just know that every time a new teaching job begins, it’s like starting from the first day all over again. “How are you doing?” people keep asking me. This will be my eleventh year teaching and the best I can say is, “I’m doing.” The sympathetic nods and kind smiles I receive in response indicate that my state of managed overwhelm is not unexpected.

Perhaps teaching is unique in the sense that you have a finite amount of time to prepare for everything, after which everything you do will have an impact on the life of a young person. I don’t mean to make myself sound more important than I am; after all, many, many things impact all of us every day and I possess no powers of divination with which to determine what is or is not ultimately relevant. Rather, it seems that the need to be good at your job has different stakes.

But again, I don’t know how other jobs work.

I do know that it always feels like this upon joining a new school. And to some degree, at the start of a new school year. In which other jobs does the entire staff use a week to prepare before beginning? It’s a bit like the performing arts, actually. Everything needs to be ready before day one and then, despite even years of rehearsal, so much seems to come down to improv – what do these particular young people need on this particular day? Making that series of decisions at the very moment they arise is both an art form and a science, one that is honed over time, and one that fades into the background when we prepare in the abstract.

Our students start on Wednesday and it feels a bit like I’m missing the forest for the trees. Much of what I’m preparing right now might be irrelevant once I meet them, yet I can’t meet them without having done this preparation. My agonizing about the loss of a piece of technology that has been at the centre of half my teaching career, while requiring me to rethink, reframe, and readjust, might very well have no impact on these students at all. I am spending my time trying to figure out new unit planners, new locations for resources, new policies, and new classroom arrangements, all of which are invisible when the students arrive but which lay the groundwork for the system to run.

And when the students arrive, I remember how it feels to educate, to learn, to inquire, to build community with young people. I remember that I’m not only competent at my job but good at it, and that every day with students brings me more joy than any school day without them.

I don’t know how other jobs work.

I don’t know if other people wake up in the middle of the night with visions of how to redo something they’ve already considered done. I don’t know the questions people in other jobs ask themselves.

In my 100 hours with these students this year, what kind of person do I want to help them become?

We need the prep work and time because we need a solid foundation. These are people we are shaping. Of course, we educators are just a small part of raising these young people; there are a plethora of other factors over which we have no control. But we have a wonderful opportunity to do some good and all young people deserve that.