By JC Bowman
Teaching can feel like riding a bull in a rodeo. You prepare as best you can. You study the challenge ahead, tighten your grip, take a deep breath, and wait for the gate to open. Then the bell rings, the classroom door closes, and everything starts moving at once.
A bull rider must respond to an animal that is powerful, unpredictable, and determined to throw him off its back. When the gates open, chaos erupts. For many, teaching is wilder than any eight-second ride and surpasses even the most adrenaline-fueled moment in a rodeo — the eight seconds a rider has to stay on a bull for a score to count. A teacher’s day is a mix of instruction, student support, planning, and collaboration, often starting early, ending late, and extending into the evenings.
Teachers face a different kind of unpredictability. Every student enters the classroom with unique needs, abilities, emotions, and experiences. Add changing policies, testing demands, paperwork, discipline problems, concerned parents, and decisions made far from the classroom, and even the strongest educator can feel as though the ground is constantly shifting.
The crowd sees only the performance. It rarely sees the preparation, exhaustion, bruises, or fear. People notice test scores and report cards, but they do not always see the teacher who stayed late to help a struggling student, bought classroom supplies with personal money, answered a parent’s message after dinner, or lay awake, wondering how to reach a child who was slipping away.
Like a cowboy gripping the rope, teachers sometimes survive on sheer determination. Their knuckles turn white as they hold on through another difficult day, another policy change, another round of criticism, and another year of being asked to do more with less. Maybe you have been in that arena.
Perhaps you have been holding on for a long time, hoping conditions will improve. You may feel battered and exhausted, or convinced that nothing will ever change. You may wonder whether anyone outside the classroom understands the price you have paid to stay there. But teaching is about more than holding on.
The rodeo cowboy keeps returning because something within him draws him back to the arena. Educators return because they believe their work matters. They remember the student who finally grasped a difficult lesson, the child who needed a dependable adult, or the former student who returned years later to say, “You made a difference in my life.”
Those moments are the educator’s championship buckle. They may never appear in an accountability report, yet they represent the real victories of teaching.
Still, courage should not be mistaken for endless endurance. We should not expect teachers to accept unreasonable workloads, unsafe classrooms, inadequate support, or constant disrespect simply because teaching is a calling. A profession cannot survive by asking good people to absorb every blow and climb back onto the bull without question.
Teachers need competitive pay, reasonable working conditions, strong discipline policies, administrative support, professional respect, and a meaningful voice in decisions that affect their classrooms. Their dedication should be honored, not exploited.
Every educator will eventually be thrown off balance. A lesson will fail. A student will struggle. A parent will grow angry. A new mandate will arrive. Some days, the goal may be to make it to the bell.
What matters is having the courage to get back up—and having people around you who will help you do so. Teaching has its dust and noise, its victories and disappointments, its joy and pain.
The gate opens again tomorrow. Take a breath. Set your feet. Hold on to your purpose. It is going to be a wild ride.
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JC Bowman is the Executive Director of Professional Educators of Tennessee
Legal Notice: Permission to reprint this editorial in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and Professional Educators of Tennessee are properly cited.
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