After 31 Years of Teaching, Something Surprised Me

I'll be honest, because at my age there's no point being otherwise: I expected to hate it.

Thirty-one years in the classroom. I've seen "revolutionary" educational technology come and go — overhead projectors, "smart" boards that mostly didn't work, a dozen apps that promised the world and delivered a login screen. Two years from retirement, I had no appetite for one more gadget that would make my job harder while pretending to make it easier. When they brought in the VR headsets, I made my peace with quietly waiting them out.

Then I watched a lesson on the solar system. Not as a teacher — I just put the headset on after school, alone, slightly embarrassed, to see what the fuss was.

And I stood among the planets.

I have taught the solar system perhaps a hundred times. I know it cold. But I had never *seen* it — not really, not the scale, not the silent enormity of the distances, not what it feels like to stand near Jupiter and understand in your body how small Earth is. Thirty-one years of teaching this, and the thing itself surprised me. I felt, for a moment, the exact wonder I'd been trying and failing to put into my students for three decades with a chalk diagram and my own enthusiasm.

That was when I understood what this was. It wasn't a gadget to replace me. It was finally giving my students the one thing I never could — the *experience* of the thing, not just my description of it. All these years I'd been standing between my students and the universe, doing my passionate best to describe a sunset to people who'd never seen colour. Now they could see it themselves.

I'm not retiring early. If anything, these last two years have become the ones I'm most curious about. After three decades, I'm learning something new about how children learn — and a little bit, in that headset among the planets, about wonder.

You're never too old to be surprised by your own subject. I'd forgotten that. A simulation of the solar system reminded me.