Comic books have lied to all of us.
Heroism isn’t capes and costumes.
It doesn’t come from radioactive spider bites or metal suits or gamma rays or distant planets.
It isn’t found in cavernous caves, palatial compounds, or hi-tech floating cities.
It isn’t wielding tricked out all-terrain vehicles, gadget-laden utility belts, hammers from the heavens, or indestructible shields.
The real heroic stuff here on this planet is firmly seated in the chests of the ordinary people who embrace an extraordinary calling; those whose superhuman hearts beat quite differently than the rest of us mere mortals.
They rise before the sun does, and in the most counterintuitive fashion, they run directly, passionately, and purposefully into the thick of the fluorescent-lit fray—and they simply save children.
They do this not in a grand single bound; not in some last-second, desperate flurry of force, not in the bombast and fanfare of spectacle—but through steady, loving attention to a methodical, repetitive, mundane string of a million seemingly insignificant decisions. They do this because they know how important each second is and how precious every child is. They see what we normal citizens don’t see or choose to walk past.
Your kids are rubbing shoulders with superhumans.
Within a few miles of wherever you are reading this, a fierce army of sleep-deprived, woefully under supported, horribly underpaid do-gooders is willingly braving the daily bullets, bruises, and battles, so that your children can become the glorious adults they are capable of being.
To all you ordinary classroom superheroes on the planet, who may not hear it often enough, loud enough, or perhaps at all: Thank you.
Thank you for enduring the countless weird, individual quirks of dozens of kids, for learning how they specifically think and process things, and for seeking to speak their brain’s personal language so that they feel heard and seen and known.
Thank you for the rest that you forfeit, the off-the-clock hours you give up, the money you take from your own pocket, and for the thousands of small sacrifices that no one will ever see from a distance. Thank you for the part of you that you give away to other people’s children.
Thank you for continually fighting through defiance and shyness, through laziness and silliness, through absentee parents and violent home lives, and getting intimately close to the hearts of your kids.
Though we often don’t stop to say it, we know just how much you do and just how fortunate all our children are to have you battling for them every single day.
Thank you most of all, for the very heroic way that without cape or costume, you fly in and you literally save kids—and in doing so, you save the world.
