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The One Thing That Will Get You Through This Week
It’s a trick for finding the good when it feels like everything is on fire.
Chris Fernandes
October 13, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
In partnership with
MAKING IT EASIER TO BE A BETTER TEACHER
With Canadian Thanksgiving just around the corner, the air is filled with talk of turkey, family, and taking a moment to be thankful. It’s a wonderful sentiment, but for teachers, gratitude isn't just a once-a-year event celebrated with mashed potatoes. It's a high-level survival skill, deployed daily somewhere between realizing the photocopier is jammed again and refereeing a heated debate over who gets the last blue crayon. This week, let's talk about finding the good stuff, even when it feels like it's buried under a mountain of permission slips.
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The Gratitude Gauntlet
Let’s be honest: teaching is a beautiful, noble profession that can also feel like an Olympic sport in navigating absurdity. The job description often omits "locating 27 missing glue stick caps," "deciphering student handwriting that looks like a seismograph reading," and "maintaining a calm facial expression when a student asks 'why?' for the 37th time in four minutes." It’s a career of profound emotional highs and bewilderingly sticky lows.
Feeling grateful in the face of this beautiful chaos isn't about pretending the hard parts don't exist. It's not about slapping a "Live, Laugh, Learn" sticker over a leaking ceiling tile. It's about acknowledging that both can be true at once: you can be utterly exhausted by the demands of the job and genuinely moved by a moment of classroom kindness. Gratitude is the quiet act of noticing the wildflower growing in the crack of a pavement.
Three Things That Didn’t Go Wildly Off the Rails
On the days when it feels like everything is going sideways, trying to conjure up feelings of profound thankfulness can feel like being asked to climb Everest in flip-flops. So, let's lower the bar. Dramatically. Introducing a simple practice: at the end of the day, find three things that didn't go horribly wrong. That's it. The bar is on the floor, and that's what makes it work.
This isn't about grand victories; it’s about the tiny wins. Maybe a lesson plan you were nervous about actually landed. Maybe the notoriously chatty corner of the room was quiet for a whole seven minutes. Or maybe, just maybe, you made it through the entire day without getting a single whiteboard marker on your clothes. These tiny moments are the signals in the noise, the small pockets of calm in the storm. They don’t erase the challenges, but they do remind us that the day wasn't a total write-off.
The Long Game
One of the toughest parts of teaching is that the true results of your work are often invisible. You’re planting seeds for a forest you may never get to see. You spend a year teaching a student to be a little kinder, a little more curious, or a little more confident, and then they move on to the next grade, the next school, the next chapter of their lives. You rarely get to see the full bloom.
This is where a different kind of gratitude comes in—a faith-based gratitude. It’s the quiet understanding that the work matters in ways that can't be measured on a report card. The patience you showed a struggling student, the encouragement you gave a shy one, the creative spark you ignited—those things don't just disappear when the final bell rings. They ripple outward for years. Being grateful for this unseen impact is a powerful anchor on days when the immediate feedback loop is… well, mostly just feedback about missing homework.
Permission to Not Be Okay
Now for a crucial point: some days are just bad. Days when you’re tired, the kids are unruly, and your best-laid plans crumble before 9:15 AM. On those days, the thought of practicing gratitude can feel not just difficult, but downright infuriating. And that is perfectly okay. You have permission to not feel grateful. You have permission to be frustrated, to be tired, and to wonder if you’re making any difference at all.
Gratitude isn't about toxic positivity or ignoring real challenges. It’s a tool, not a rule. Sometimes, the most grateful thing you can do is acknowledge your own resilience. Be thankful for the strength that got you through the day. Be thankful for the colleague who gave you an empathetic nod in the hallway. And be thankful for the fact that tomorrow is a new day, one that might have slightly less glitter stuck to the floor.
The Takeaway
Your work is complex, demanding, and more important than you probably give yourself credit for. In the thick of it, it's easy to lose sight of the small joys and the long-term impact. Finding moments of gratitude is simply a way to steady the ship and remember why you started this wild journey in the first place.
Whether your long weekend is packed with family dinners or devoted to the sacred pursuit of doing absolutely nothing, may it be genuinely restful. You've more than earned it.
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