Jessica Griffin

I think honestly the fact that I can just look at every child and find something lovable and something special about every single child. My colleagues would say that I'm always the one who will take the kid that everybody else wants to send out of the room. I will find something lovable about any child. Which is probably why my work has mainly focused in special education. I feel like my gifts and my strengths just lie there. And probably stemming from my own experiences, just the things that I went through in my own childhood. I think just prepared me to be a strong advocate and to be a voice for students, for kids who need someone to advocate for them.

I think try or move on to the next challenge before I'm in a place where I feel ineffective, or bored, or not challenged anymore. I think that was some of the best advice I could have ever had, because with each career move that I made, I was always making it feeling like I wasn't ready. But it was really good to do that in hindsight. Because I think waiting until I'm just unhappy, or I don't like what I'm doing anymore would probably not put me in a good mindset to take on a new challenge.

I'd probably ask her a lot of questions first. Find out, do you want to have a family one day? You've really got to think about those things in terms of being a teacher, because teachers pay and just the value that teachers hold isn't the same anymore in our society. So I would say, is this something you really want to do? Only do it if you honestly feel called to do it, because everybody is somebody's baby. And when you're in a room full of other people's babies, like, they are sending you their most perfect thing that they cherish and have created on this earth, and if you can't see every child in that way, then you shouldn't be doing the work.

A lot of things have changed. People aren't going into education like they used to. There just aren't enough people wanting to do the work. The professionalism has changed somewhat because there aren't the same level of people going into teaching that did when I first started. The people that are teaching now sometimes are people with just a degree who are like, well, I can do this because it's a job for now, until I can do what I really want to be doing. Some of those other dynamics, the political parts of it, the professionalism, those are the parts that are more challenging.

Probably my strongest values are staying true to myself, being open to what the bigger plans might be for me, not just the things that I had planned. Many of the things that have happened in my career and in my personal life are things that I didn't necessarily plan, but I was open to opportunities and possibilities that were brought to me. I think always keeping my own mental health in the forefront, in work that is very focused on other people. Making sure to keep myself healthy and grounded emotionally, mentally, physically has been a really important piece threaded through my career.