Commentary

There is a moment most educators know but rarely name. It lives at the end of a hard day or in the middle of a season that has gone on too long. You drove home in silence. The parent email held words that stayed with you longer than they should have. The day did not go the way it needed to go.

Somewhere in that silence the question surfaces: Why do I do this?

What happens next matters more than most professional development conversations are willing to admit. The answer you find in that moment will either give strength to your weary spirit or hand you a pen to write your resignation letter.

The Phrase We Keep Using

Somewhere along the way, education culture landed on an answer to burnout: Remember your why.

It is a well intentioned sentiment meant to root educators in what ignited their fire to teach. It is well known that the teacher pipeline is shrinking. Nearly one in ten teachers leave within their first three years, and roughly fifteen percent of teachers leave the profession every year. Burnout is not a buzzword. It is a documented, systemic crisis. The people who coined "remember your why" were trying to meet a real and serious problem.

The phrase, though, carries a hidden assumption. It assumes the why is worth remembering. That whatever originally brought an educator into the classroom is deep enough and sturdy enough to hold when the work gets hard.

That assumption deserves examination.

Some whys are shallow, and there is no shame in that. Teaching offers a schedule with genuine appeal. Some people were good at a subject and teaching seemed like the reasonable next step. Those are honest answers. They are not the kind of answers that pull someone back into the building after the kind of day that makes them question everything.

Pointing someone back to a shallow why does not deepen it. On the hardest days, it only makes the person carrying it feel more alone.

What the Phrase Gets Wrong

There is a second problem with "remember your why" that is less often named. It is quietly individualistic.

It locates the problem inside the teacher. You are burning out, so you look inward. Reconnect with yourself. Find your motivation again. The implication is that if you are struggling, the solution lives somewhere inside you.

What actually keeps teachers in the profession tells a different story. Teachers stay when administration handles hard things well. They stay when a colleague shows up on a difficult afternoon and helps carry the weight. They stay when they are surrounded by people who believe the work matters and act like it.

The research on retention is not primarily a story about individual motivation. It is a story about community, support, and conditions. "Remember your why" puts the entire burden of sustainability on the teacher and quietly lets institutions off the hook.

A teacher in an unsupported building with no collegial community will not be saved by remembering their why. They will pick up a pen.

What Is Actually Underneath

Teaching is inherently formational work. Every teacher doing it well is participating in something that shapes a human life. The way a person learns to think, to question, to persist through difficulty is the real work underneath every lesson plan and every school year. It is true regardless of subject, grade level, or context.

Most good teachers know this. They feel it even when they cannot name it. It is the thing underneath the why that gives it actual weight. It is not the schedule or the original ambition, but the recognition that this work does something real in a human being that lasts far beyond the classroom.

For educators in Christian schools, that can be named plainly as discipleship. The subject is the vehicle, and the destination carries eternal weight. The work is not only developing thinkers but forming people whose minds and faith are being shaped at the same time. For educators working in secular spaces with the same conviction, the calling is identical even when the language must shift. The weight does not change based on the building.

For every educator regardless of context, the question worth sitting with is not what originally brought you into teaching, but whether you believe this work matters beyond you. The question is whether you believe you are participating in something larger than a curriculum or a school year or a career.

That is the answer that holds on the hard days.

What We Should Be Saying Instead

Awareness comes first. Someone unwilling to look honestly at what is underneath their why will not find anything worth holding onto. That awareness sometimes arrives through a hard season. Sometimes it comes from observing another educator and recognizing something true in the way they work and why they stay. Sometimes it requires a mentor who creates the conditions for reflection before the hard season arrives.

Awareness without community, though, is fragile.

The teachers who stay and stay well are not the ones who remembered their why most often. They are the ones who found people who understood the work at the level it actually operates. They found a community that reminded them they were not carrying the calling alone.

If "remember your why" is the phrase we have been using, perhaps what we should be saying instead is this: Find your community in your calling.

The hard days become survivable not when you dig deeper into yourself but when you are surrounded by people who understand what you are actually doing and refuse to let you forget that it matters.

A calling lived in community holds. A why remembered in isolation does not. 

Anthropic just launched Claude for Teachers. I could not have more heart eyes for this if I tried. 😍 Here's why:

Last March, a colleague asked if I'd heard of Claude. I hadn't, so naturally, I went down the rabbit hole.

I'm still impressed.

A few things that stood out to me as a teacher who's protective of my own thinking (and my students'): 

It remembers what matters, and I control it.

I can see exactly what it knows about me and tell it what not to remember. It knows I never want AI to generate content for me outright. Edit it, proofread it, push my thinking further? Always. Generate it wholesale? Never. It also knows I'm an Oxford comma girl. 💁🏻‍♀️ The small things matter. If in ten years I decide I'm not an Oxford comma girl (never gonna happen), I can delete that from Claude's memory.

It's become a real project partner.

I built out our school's entire high school retreat (teams, games, flyers) inside one organized project. I also used it to work through the logistics of a courtroom based project that turned into one of my most successful units this year. I even talked through book publishing options and troubleshot website domain issues for my new site. I’m excited to see how the teacher version builds on this partnership.

It builds tools, not just answers.


I had it create things like worksheet templates that loaded straight into my Drive and digital tools for my students to interrogate their own thinking, to dig deeper.

That said, Claude still has room to grow.


Claude doesn't offer standalone image generation like Copilot or ChatGPT. It can build diagrams and visual mockups through code, which is useful, but it's not creating illustrative images from a prompt. That's the one gap I'd love to see closed.

Transparency & integrity resonate with students.


You bet your bottom dollar I talked to my students about LLMs because… how else can I teach them to use them ethically and educationally if I never bring them up? Honestly? It’s part of the job now. These are tools for us and our students, but we need to talk about them.

On the last day of school, one of my students who is in a cybersecurity program knocked on my door. "Claude is awesome," he said. "It's helping me code so I can keep my data centralized instead of sending it overseas." Then he showed me his conversation history, pairing what he'd learned in cybersecurity and robotics with Claude to build the thing he dreamed up.

We'd spent the whole year talking about ethical AI use in my classroom. Watching a student apply that thinking independently on the last day of school? GUH! That's the win.

One last thing: if you're hesitant about using AI in the classroom, Claude for Teachers offers an AI fluency for pK-12 course to help educators understand safe, effective AI use.

If you've had a similar "Wait! This is actually useful" moment with an AI tool in your classroom, I'd love to hear about it.  Feel free to connect with me via the Google Form or on LinkedIn. 

AI in the Classroom Reflections: Claude for Teachers, Update   

Clocking back in to say I'm making my way through Anthropic's AI Fluency for pK–12 Educators course, and these are the things I want to share with an educator who's on the fence about checking it out.

(1) Anthropic's definition of AI Fluency is gold.

 Anthropic defines AI fluency as "the ability to work with AI systems in ways that are effective, efficient, ethical, and safe." Practical skills, knowledge, insights, and values.

Uh, hello? Yes. 100%. ✅

Notice it says "the ability to work WITH AI systems." Part of this programming is meant to help you get more out of your AI interactions, but the other part? It's meant to support educators in making "thoughtful, responsible choices about when and how to use AI." From my experience, limited training has been offered for that second part.

The closest comparison I have, in terms of educational revolution, is the creation of the search engine. Educators had to learn how to teach students who could Google instead of just walking to the library. We need to be equipped. 

That leads me to my next point:

(2) Built for a Learner

The course was built in partnership with Teach For America, and honestly? You 100% can tell it was created with educators. 

Yes, instruction is part of building fluency, but the bigger part is practice. This course has practice embedded into it. I, for one, am glad this isn't another teacher course that explains a tool and ignores pedagogy.

Two things that mattered to me and should matter to the skeptics: the course is Creative Commons licensed and model-agnostic, meaning that you can take the course and complete the practice with any AI tool.

It also gives you a workshop kit to run with your own department. If you've been the only person in your building thinking about this out loud, the workshop kit is worth knowing about.

My goal is to better my understanding and AI fluency first. Then, make a thoughtful decision about HOW this tool can be used ethically and educationally in my classroom.

Stay tuned, reflections on Khan Academy and Magic School are coming next in this series.

So many English teachers I know are averse to teaching grammar. They either don't do it or don't find it useful.

Grammar is, admittedly, very technical. You know who some of my best grammar students are? Math students. Makes sense, grammar is formulaic in the same way math is.

For educators whose bread and butter is often in interpretation of grey areas like figurative language and thematic messages, grammar is the dry, unenjoyable part of teaching. Many ELA friends tell me they went to school to teach literature, not grammar. Their students don't retain the parts of speech anyway, so why bother?
If we don't see the benefit in what we're teaching, neither will our students. They will not invest in it.

Part of the problem: many of us were trained in an era, or a philosophy, that treated grammar as separate from meaning. Whole language pushed immersion over explicit instruction, and an entire generation of teachers came up without ever being shown how conventions and discourse connect. When a young educator tells me they don't see the point of teaching grammar, I think no one ever explained the throughline from subject-verb agreement to a coherent paragraph.

Grammar is tied to literacy just as much as it is to writing. If you don't understand language conventions, you can't interpret what you're reading accurately. It's like that meme: "Let's eat, Grandma." vs. "Let's eat Grandma." One makes you polite. The other makes you a cannibal.

Students can't fully understand comma placement without understanding clauses. They can't understand clauses without understanding subjects and verbs. It's a chain: skip a link, and the whole thing collapses.

I have a wide range of student backgrounds and levels of exposure to grammar. I've had to find ways to bridge the gaps and challenge students across that spectrum of ability. I have used Khan Academy to meet that range. Students can get targeted instruction and practice. (Love their videos!) I use it for extra practice on a particular concept, and to get everyone on the same page.

Most grammar curriculums are still practice-based, which means connecting that practice to a finished, cohesive piece of writing still belongs to us as educators. Khan Academy gives me strong raw material: identifying gaps, targeted practice, common ground across a range of backgrounds. The bridge from convention to discourse? That's still mine to build.

Strong adult writers have strong conventions of language. My husband is decidedly anti having his wife proof his writing, he feels like it's cheating. But when he went back to school as an adult, his professor told him to use Khan Academy to strengthen his writing skills. He found it invaluable.

If grammar's the part of your curriculum you dread, or the part you know you're weakest on: what's stopped you from finding a way in?