It’s Teacher Appreciation Week, so I’ve been thinking not only of the many extraordinary teachers I’ve had in my own life but about the very work of teaching itself. I’ve been a classroom teacher now for almost thirty years—and despite pedagogical innovations and technological advances, some things never change. In fact, it feels like much of what runs the classroom is “housekeeping”: prepping and grading and writing/recording various things. Over and over and over. And like chores like laundry or vacuuming or cleaning bathrooms, just as one round is done, another round seems to need to begin.

Now, I don’t actually mind chores, but sometimes they feel more chore-y, more wearisome than at others.

But then, I go to events like our faculty tribute dinner, and I witness again all the work my colleagues are doing across campus. I hear the success stories of their scholarship, their amazing community engagement, their immense time invested in students in and out of the classroom. I see a retiring colleague—one who spent countless hours on thankless college-wide projects in addition to teaching and research and all the rest. And I feel again the worthiness of the work, the holiness of the quotidian, the necessity of the daily drudge.

To see the end is inspiring, but it does obscure how much it all takes. How much less would we be without all the hidden work? How much kinder would we be if we could remember all that goes on behind the scenes?

All of this reminded me of two poems by Jane Kenyon that help me remember just how essential it all is and how preferable to complaint. As importantly, the heritage of all our labor: the “chores” of our profession tie us to all those who labored in the past. They did not grow “weary in well doing;” may we in our season hold onto the promise that we “reap, if we faint not.”

The Clothes Pin
How much better it is
to carry wood to the fire
than to moan about your life.
How much better
to throw the garbage
onto the compost, or to pin the clean
sheet on the line
with a gray-brown wooden clothes pin!

Finding a Long Gray Hair
I scrub the long floorboards
in the kitchen, repeating
the motions of other women
who have lived in this house.
And when I find a long gray hair
floating in the pail,
I feel my life added to theirs.