New teachers, student teachers, pre-service teachers, this one's for you: If you are pursuing a career in teaching your particular field of study, then you probably love your content. In fact, you probably love it a lot, and that passionate interest is probably a big reason why you're a teacher at all. You probably spent four(?) years of undergraduate education studying your content in great depth, becoming more and more passionate about it as time passed. I know in music, this is especially true. (If you're not a music teacher, feel free to insert whatever content you are passionate about and view the rest of the post through that lens). Even as music education majors, we tend to spend a large percentage of our undergraduate education studying music theory and history, practicing our primary instrument, and climbing the rungs of the performance ensembles. Training in this conservatory model tends to distort our perception a bit: we often think of ourse...
I am a high school choir teacher teaching at one of the most diverse high schools in my state. I am in my fourteenth year of public school education, and I taught middle school choir for the first twelve. My program's mantra is "Embrace the Struggle," and that mantra continues to take on new significance in a time of great turmoil and upheaval.