for spending my adult years in school:
- People person, socially interactive
- professional autonomy
- Regularly scheduled restarts
- structural predictability
- Wide but manageable margin of unpredictability
- tangible appreciation
- recognizable progress
- dynamic relationships
- Huge range and variety of relationships
- library access (Wild!)
- Librarian friends
- Witness others’ growth
- physically active days
- music selection of choice
- experimentation belongs
- space and time for humor
- intellectual challenge
- emotional workout
- continued learning
- Possible to show and receive love
This will be the 27th school year at my institution and my 30th year of teaching. I know my why; it’s selfish and social at the same time. My why is multifaceted and contextual, elastic and generous. There’s no one word to capture the whole. No way to condense all the benefits down to a spunky slogan. I keep choosing school because school (and children and colleagues and families and all the energy wrapped in that) choose me. In school, I am, in fact, chosen.
edifiedlistener 
But that T-shirt! It is all the reasons! I don’t know what those reasons are for, but if I had a shirt like that I’d use it as a reason for anything. It’s awesome!