FINDING YOUR PURPOSE
Finding my purpose as an educator was a long process, one that didn’t fully emerge until after more than a decade in the classroom.
In high school, I took two classes that immediately defined what I thought I wanted to do with my life, Journalism and Business. I was going to own my own theatre company and be a playwright and then have my own column in a local newspaper, and I would speak to the world.
Now, there are people who are sharing inspiration through writing and theatre with the world, but it’s a hard world to crack into, and theatre and journalism can be daunting for a 20-year-old with a baby son, and high values on ethics and respect.
I found the theatre became about making money and creating a “product” and I never did follow through with my journalism dreams. I didn’t feel like I was making a difference, and more than writing, more than theatre, that’s what I wanted. I wanted to help and make a difference.
I graduated with my degree in commerce and worked full-time as an accountant for 5 months! I finished my Contemporary Arts Degree and did well with an events management business, but after an accident meant I couldn’t do the rigging, I needed a change in career.
I still loved to write, but the newsroom didn’t seem like the place for me.
So I started working in security and moved on to working in prisons.
I kept looking for my “ever after” career.
I have been teaching private music lessons from a young age and also did some retail work, reception, and finance clerk roles, but my purpose wasn’t fulfilled.
When you’re 23 with a university degree and no purpose, you can feel worthless. That was me. I couldn’t see spending the rest of my life in any of this work. I have the utmost respect for people in retail, security, and the other industries I tried my hand at, but I didn’t feel like it was my calling.
I doodled lists and wrote free verse poems in the margins of my journals and kept looking for the next thing.
I could read people. I knew what they wanted, but I didn’t know what I wanted. Until I looked deeper at my last few jobs and found a common thread. Teaching.
When I was teaching music, working as a teacher’s aide, working to teach my team in the theatre, or inducting new guards, I felt like I had some sense of happiness. Somehow this just fits me. Having not enjoyed school, it was something I fought pretty hard against; however, I knew it was something that was going to be fit, having started to teach drama and music at my son’s school as a volunteer.
I thought I would become a drama, and music teacher (which I did get my degree in) however it didn’t exactly turn out that way. I took a job teaching drama, music, and English. I enjoyed teaching and had found my purpose.
After nine years of focusing on content, I realised that I was losing a sense of my ‘why’, my purpose. Sure, I was good at building rapport with students. We had fun. We did things outside the curriculum, I went to their concerts and games when I could.
After nine years though, education had become about standards and testing. Students walked into my classroom down-trodden and hurt by the words of peers. School was becoming less safe for outsiders[NV1]. For many of them, their ‘why’ was to come to school, go through the motions, and pass tests. My why seemed to be to get them to pass. I couldn’t do it anymore.
I left the school system, became a mindset coach, counsellor and studied psychology, and then found people who were equally passionate about the purpose of others as the curriculum we were teaching.
Education became alive for me again. I found online platforms of teachers who were passionate about authentically focusing on students as holistic young adults and my world expanded by sharing with educators passionate about teaching.
I discovered Genius Hour through Daniel Pink’s TED Talk. The Puzzle of Motivation and Pink’s book ‘Drive’ focuses on aspects of motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Why don’t we focus on this in schools?
Students want choice (autonomy), they want to be challenged (mastery) - but not overwhelmed to the point where it is unattainable, and they need to know that what they do matters (purpose). They’re human, but we treat school separate from what they need in the world outside of school.
Genius Hour in Education is the concept of using 20% (or so) of a work week (or in education, a school week) to devote to students’ own interests and passion projects.
This concept changed my life. It changed my teaching. I felt like I could help students improve in reading and writing by pursuing their own passions.
I created programs around the world on work, well-being, and life skills and promoted students to design projects within this.
The results were remarkable, and this form of teaching is something I am very aligned with.
Yes, I see growth in those academic skills, but Genius Hour did something else. It gave me purpose again.
My purpose was never to make a difference by teaching them how to be better readers and writers.
Yes, that’s part of my job, and I take it seriously.
However, my true purpose is to help my students (and colleagues) find their purpose.
It took needing to find my own to realise this, but I realised and came to believe that every student needs a connection, a voice, and to be needed and know they matter.
My focus has become mostly on building relationships with and amongst my class.
It was about building community.
My purpose is to help everyone who comes into my classroom to find even a little bit of why they are valued in this world, and by being able to use class time to pursue what matters to them, what they believe can make a difference in the world.
Teaching isn’t easy.
My calling, my purpose, keeps me moving, busy, exhausted, and sometimes anxious, but it’s what I love to do. It leads every part of my life. When I watched my inquisitive, curious, and remarkably intelligent son build websites, write, draw, or sing, I knew he would reach his goals and keep pursuing his dreams even if they changed along the way.
I want my family, my students, and my colleagues to know that they belong.
What they have to contribute is so important to their world. It took me a long time to figure that out for myself, and now, I know that I really, truly matter.