What I Learned About Time From Going From Kindergarten Teacher to High School Principal

I was a bilingual kindergarten teacher before I was anything else in this work. I still remember the first day with my first class. Backpacks bigger than the kids carrying them. Brand new crayons, unbroken, still smelling like crayons. Five-year-olds standing at the door of the next thirteen years of their lives, half excited and half about to cry.

Some of those kids walked in with nothing. So I gave them their first crayons. I did it on purpose. I wanted them to walk into school and feel like school was ready for them. Like they belonged there. Because I knew — even then — that the way the first day feels is the way they are going to remember school for a long time.

Years later, I was the principal of a high school. I stood at a podium and called names and handed out diplomas. And the kids walking across that stage were not mine from kindergarten. They were someone else’s. That is the part most of us in this work do not stop and sit with long enough.

Every diploma I handed out was something a kindergarten teacher I never met started thirteen years before I got there. And every crayon I ever gave a five-year-old — those kids were graduating somewhere I would never be, getting their diploma from a principal who would never know my name.

What That Actually Taught Me

It is long. The good you do in this work takes a long time to show up. And almost nobody gets to see the whole thing. The kindergarten teacher does not get to see the diploma. The high school principal does not get to see the crayon. You get a year, or a few years, or a season — and then the kid moves on, and what happens after that happens in classrooms and buildings you will never set foot in.

Standing at that podium, I finally understood what I had really been doing as a kindergarten teacher. I had been starting something for someone else to finish. And every diploma I was handing out was something somebody else had started for me to finish.

That is the work. The little things you do — really paying attention to one kid, believing in one kid, being the adult who shows up for one kid — those things keep going long after the kid leaves your room. You almost never get to see how far they go. But they go.

Why I Am Telling You This

Not because it is a feel-good story. I am telling you because it is true.

The teacher reading this who is not sure their work is landing — it is. You will not see most of it. The principal reading this in the middle of the worst stretch of their career, sitting in their car on a Thursday morning trying to find a way to walk into the building — I want you to know it is real. The crayons being handed out somewhere right now are connected to diplomas that will be handed years from now, in a ceremony you may or may not be there for, in a building that maybe does not even exist yet.

The work keeps going. It moves forward and it moves up even when this year is hard to believe in. Almost nobody gets to see how far it actually went because of what they did. That does not mean it did not get there. It just means the system was never set up to show us.

That is why this work is worth doing. Not every day, and not for free. But it is worth it. Write that down. Read it on the days when the cost is all you can see.