Like many of you, when I was growing up education is all I knew. Except my experience with education was a little more sizable. I grew up with both my parents as educators. So, when I was at school I was surrounded by education, and when I went home all I heard was what happened at school for my parents.

I am not complaining, I love that my parents are educators. It takes a certain type of person to be able to teach 7th graders how to cook and to try to make 16-year-olds get interested in Shakespeare. It didn’t work for me, though. Many students progressing through high school often think that their teachers hate them and want them to do poorly. I can remember countless conversations with my friends about how the only reason they are failing is because the teacher hates them. If a teacher hated their students, then why would they continue to be a teacher? They could have chosen many other routes that would have made their lives a lot easier.

If you have ever seen a teacher outside of school around the end of May, then you have seen exhaustion. Teaching is not a 9-5 job, like many people perceive it as. Most high school teachers get 50 minutes a day to plan for their lessons, where they may have to give four different lessons on any given day. During that planning they usually have students coming into their classrooms asking questions about homework, or how they could get extra credit because they did poorly on a test. Then teachers are forced to stay after school for an ungodly amount of time to get their lesson plans ready for the next week, and if they have a family then they have to bring it home and try to find time to work it in between picking their kids up from school, snack time, dinner time, bath time and trying to get them to sleep; then they can start their planning at around 10:30, if they are lucky.

If you think that teachers use the exact same template for their classes every year, you’re wrong. Good teachers are always researching new ideas and lessons for their students, because teachers want their students to succeed. As a kid, I always wondered why my parents were putting in these long hours during and after school. I now realize that it’s because they loved their students; no matter how difficult or annoying they can be. I think this statement goes for many educators. Teachers care for their student more than people give them credit.

Being a teacher isn’t an easy job, not just because of the long hours and difficult kids, but because you see kids grow up that don’t live in the best circumstances. I was in a high school classroom the other day, and I overhead a conversation between a student and a teacher. This conversation dealt with the student’s living and family situation. I didn’t hear all of it, but I did hear that her father had left the house and taken all the food with him. They didn’t have enough money to go out and buy food and had their electricity cancelled.

The fact that a student can open up like that to a teacher means that the student truly respects that teacher and they have built up a relationship of trust. That teacher has now become more than just an educator. She has become a counselor, a friend and a steady rock in that student’s life.

Yes, teachers get paid poorly, but I am not here to complain about that. Many teachers don’t care how much they get paid; they care more about how many of their students graduate high school, then graduate college and then find a job and start a family of their own. Teachers didn’t choose this profession to own big houses and drive fancy cars; they chose this profession to make a difference in the lives of other.

So yes, the taxpayers’ money could be spend in other places but we ought to be careful not to vilify this profession while doing so. Teachers are not glorified babysitters with summers off. Their profession fuels all others, and on a normal day, that is amazing enough in and of itself.

If teachers were to explain why they teach, truthfully, then it would take hours. Each day more than 55 million students attend the country’s 130,000 schools. Each day, parents and guardians entrust some 7 million teachers with the education of our children. These teachers do not take this trust and responsibility lightly though. They take it so seriously that many times it takes over their lives. Teachers may not make much money, but they do make a serious difference in this world.