Francis Paquin – Contributor

At the ripe age of 15, when you’ve finally figured out the right amount of deodorant to use and the consequences of putting water in your parents’ vodka, you are asked to choose your career path. Not just any path either, the one that will decide what seems to be your fate. So if you were pretty mediocre in just about everything you touched, you’re going off pure instinct at this point. If you watched “Good Will Hunting” or “Dead Poets Society” one too many times, then teaching is a pretty easy place to land. 

Your aunty and family friends always called it an honourable choice. They love that word, honourable. Usually followed by something about the two months off in the summer, or a quick comment about how teachers never stop protesting, but in a way that still sounds respectable. You start to believe it. You picture yourself standing on a desk, reading something meaningful to a bunch of motivated students, in a nicely lit room filled with books. It feels just real enough to not question. Until life slaps you behind the head four years later with a wet eraser. 

Image courtesy of Francis Paquin

Now you’re in an overcrowded classroom, trying to explain what a noun is for the 26th time that day. Half the class is still lost, a few have completely checked out, and the answers are already sitting on the board in red. No one is standing on desks. No one is having a life changing moment. You’re just there, repeating yourself, wondering how something that once felt so full now feels so… normal. And that’s the weird part. It’s not bad. It’s just not what you thought it would be. 

At some point, you catch yourself choking on that dream you once fed yourself. Wondering if those 20 000 dollars in tuition were actually worth it. Wondering if you believed a little too easily that a career would be fulfilling just because someone told you so, or because it sounded honourable, or in my case because Robin Williams was so damn convincing. 

But you don’t just drop it. You start to see things differently, or maybe you just learn how to talk about them differently. Because those nouns don’t magically get more interesting the more times you repeat them. But that one moment, when it finally clicks for someone after the 27th time, does feel like something. Not in a movie kind of way, just in a quiet, almost easy to miss kind of way. And maybe that’s the point no one really explains. The job doesn’t come with meaning built into it. It never did. It gives you something to do, something to show up to and from there you’re the one who has to decide if it means anything. 

As I finish my own academic journey, I find the whole thing a bit underwhelming. My life hasn’t revolutionized the way I thought it might seven years ago. None of my students have stood up on their chairs. I haven’t dramatically turned someone’s life around. But there’s still something in the small moments. The little laughs in the morning. The tired smiles when the sun hasn’t even risen yet. Nothing you’d put in a movie, but still enough to make you come back the next day. 

And if it all doesn’t work out, if one day it really doesn’t feel like enough, there’s always the option to become a surf instructor somewhere in South America. Which, honestly, might have been the more honest choice at 16 anyway.