What does marriage have to do with teaching?

After considering whether or not to publish this perhaps exceedingly emotional post, I've decided to trust my co-workers' opinions and just do it. Maybe it's my wedding approaching. Or maybe it was the Monday effect. Or both. Anyway, here it goes:

I’ll start today’s post talking about my wedding. I know it might seem a little bit out of space, but it will make sense. Hopefully!

As part of the religious ceremony for the big day, there have been a series of pre-wedding steps. As I didn’t attend the first communion course that many Brazilians go through in Elementary school, I had to take a one-to-one intensive for adults with the deacon of the church we’ve chosen to get married at.

I didn’t imagine I would come out with such positive and deep impressions about this course, to be very honest. The Friday night encounters did not appeal to me as a perfect way to kick off the weekend, but it turned out to be really interesting.

The deacon managed to find very rather meaningful words throughout the course. During the last encounter, he came out with this one: “nobody gets married to be happy. You get married to make the other one happy, and vice-versa, of course”. So, in other words, you do get married to be happy, but in a sense it seems that your happiness is on the hands of your partner, and that by keeping her/him happy, you should find your own happiness. Beautifully put, in my opinion.

It didn’t take much for me to start drawing parallels with my career as a teacher. For each and every lesson, at least for me, there is only one reason: make students happy. Not saying that I’ll be telling jokes for two hours straight, but us teachers make students happy by entertaining them, by bringing interesting topics or using students’ lives as themes, by engaging them in the lesson, by getting them to participate and communicate in class, and of course, by teaching them something. And why not, by inspiring them! That’s a pretty happy feeling at the end of a lesson, isn’t it? Interact, talk, be active and participative, feel inspired and learn something new.

It’s a soothing and pleasing feeling this one that you work to make other people happy. I certainly think it’s a inspiring perspective from which to look at teaching.

And looking ahead to my wedding, I figure that I’ll be making it official that I want to keep doing whatever I can to make the most important person in my life happy. It just hadn’t occurred to me until now that, in a distinct yet comparable way, I have been married with my profession for a while now.

It might sound excessively romantic and naïve, or maybe that’s how people feel right before getting married, I don’t know. Still, it is quite an inspiring and special feeling to look at myself right now as someone who wants to find happiness through making other people happy.