Every school has a Jacqui. Jacqui is what I call a “challenge magnet”. She doesn’t chase the shiny, compliant, teacher-pleasing kids. She gravitates, almost involuntarily, to the child who starts the year the farthest behind in life.
Nobody trains you for that. Nobody gives you a pay rise for that. But every year, teachers like Jacqui step up anyway.
We sometimes remember to celebrate our Jacquis. We heavily rely on them and we also quietly risk burning them out if we’re not careful.
Jacqui’s 2025 hasn’t been a romantic, slow-motion movie of triumph. It’s been chaos, setbacks, hard days, harder days and a few days where she probably considered selling seashells by the seashore instead of teaching.
She’s been challenged hundreds of times by a student who had every reason and every excuse for pushing her away.
And she didn’t give up. Not once.
Not because she’s perfect. She’s not. She’d tell you she stuffed up plenty.
But every time she stuffed up, she leaned back into good practice like it was a compass, not a shortcut.
This has especially been the case with Affective Statements – over and over, long after most teachers would’ve thrown in the towel.
You see, the Jacquis of the world understand a few things the rest of us sometimes forget:
- The job is the long game.
- Anything that works the first time is probably just a sugar hit.
- Perfection and prevention are illusions sold by people who’ve never stood in front of Year 3 at 2.47pm on a Thursday.
- A kid can be 200 Affective Interactions from a breakthrough … and the best teachers don’t quit at 190.
- The behavioural gains you can measure (frequency and severity reduced) are actually signs of something far more meaningful – a kid crossing invisible thresholds in employability, in staying out of the justice system, in lowering the risk of teen suicide, in learning how to have a healthy relationship with someone who isn’t paid to tolerate them.
- And yes, it’s way bigger than this kid’s 2025 test scores.
The maddening, ridiculous truth that Jacqui reveals is that teaching is the only profession where you can do absolutely everything right and still feel like you’re failing … right up until the moment you realise you weren’t.
When this boy is 25 years old, stable, employed and able to love someone without hurting them, he won’t know it was Jacqui.
He won’t remember the Affective Statements. He won’t recall the 200 small, stubborn acts of relational courage that held his world together for a whole year.
But you and I will know. And, deep down, Jacqui knows.
The virtuosos always know when they’ve played the piece well. Even if nobody claps at the end.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. As you head into the break, I hope you give yourself permission to notice the invisible wins — the ones only you will ever know about. They count more than you think, and they last longer than you realise.
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