When Teaching Is No Longer Enough
HAVANA TIMES – She said something that kept going around in my head: “My work is my life.”
She is a teacher.
But not one of those who simply put in their hours. She is a true teacher, one with a calling. One of those who find a thousand reasons in a classroom to get up every morning; who see a blackboard as a place to dream, and each student as a responsibility they carry home with them.
My mother is like so many educators who are still in Cuba and whom I deeply admire.
Because staying, when everything around you seems to be pushing you to leave, requires enormous strength.
And yet, she told me she would not be going back this school year. Not because she had stopped loving her profession, but because she was tired.
I have known that voice all my life. And perhaps that is why her words hurt me in a way that is difficult to explain.
Because there is a big difference between no longer loving something and discovering that you simply no longer have the strength to keep it going.
As she spoke to me, I thought about September and wondered when this month, which once smelled of new notebooks and new beginnings, started to feel different.
Perhaps it was when families began having to make increasingly difficult calculations, and parents discovered that getting a child ready for the start of the school year could become one more worry among so many others.
Perhaps it happened when children began arriving in classrooms carrying a weariness that should not belong to them. You can see it in their eyes, in their lack of enthusiasm, and in that troubling indifference. Because they should be curious about the world, even about the simplest things.
And yet, not all children begin September feeling sad. Some still want to go to school. Like my girls, who look forward to that moment because it allows them to get away, even if only for a few hours, from a reality that weighs heavily on them. To go to school and forget for a while. To see other people, have other experiences, talk, learn, laugh about anything at all… and, for a few hours, simply be children again, as they deserve to be.
Then I understood that opening the doors of a school is not enough to say that education continues. There also must be energy to teach and a desire to learn.
Behind every desk there needs to be a child who can still imagine a future, and standing in front of that child, someone with enough strength to help them build it.
My mother could no longer do that this September.
And her absence, even if it is only that of one teacher from one classroom, says so much to me.
Because she did not give up on her dreams.
Reality simply ended up exhausting a woman who, for so many years, had found meaning in teaching.
But there is something that comforts me.
A teacher does not remain only in the classroom. She remains in the doubts she once helped clear up, in the questions she taught someone to ask, and in the confidence she awakened in some young person, who perhaps did not believe very much in themselves.
And that also made me think about all those who are still there. Those who return every morning to try again and who, despite their exhaustion, continue looking for a way to awaken in their students the curiosity that makes learning meaningful.
We cannot measure how much that is worth. But we can imagine how much a society loses when its educators run out of strength.
When the youngest children stop looking forward to the beginning of classes with that mixture of nervousness and joy that we once knew, something much deeper is being lost.
Our children have the right to look forward to beautiful things. To be excited about seeing their friends again, about learning something they do not yet know, about opening a notebook and feeling that an entire world lies before them, waiting to be discovered, along with thousands of stories that are only just beginning.
September is already here. The classrooms have reopened, and many voices once again fill the rooms.
From far away, I think about the blackboard my mother did not return to write on and about everything she still has left to teach.
Now I understand that some farewells do not happen because we stop loving what we do. Sometimes a moment simply comes when exhaustion speaks louder than vocation.
Because behind every teacher who leaves a classroom, there is a story—and a society that, in some way, failed to take care of someone who was helping it grow.
My mother will always be a teacher, even though she did not return this September.
Some professions do not end when we stop practicing them. They remain in the people whose lives we touched, in the words someone remembers many years later, and in those small things that, without realizing it, we helped plant.
So even though my mother did not return to the classroom this September, I like to think that some part of her did.
And then the words she had said to me took on another meaning: “My work is my life.”
Because some jobs end when the workday ends.
And there are others, like my mother’s, that live on in those of us who were fortunate enough to learn from them.
Read more from the diary of Dany Cesario here on Havana Times.