When I was a kid, I believed a lot of things that seem ridiculous now.
I believed gum stayed in your stomach for seven years if you swallowed it, which made the human body sound less like a miracle of creation and more like a storage locker.
I believed life was easier for adults, because adults got to make the rules, stay up late, drive cars and eat whatever they wanted. No one explained the fine print about mortgages, insurance, car repairs, health problems, taxes, marriage, children, jobs, responsibilities or waking up sore because you slept wrong.
I believed that if you ate Pop Rocks and drank Coke, your stomach might explode. Poor Mikey from the Life cereal commercials got dragged into that one, even though he had done nothing more dangerous than like cereal.
I believed the characters in my favorite shows were at least a little bit real. I knew they were on television, but a part of me still wanted to think they kept living somewhere after the credits rolled.
And I absolutely believed things in commercials were as good as they seemed. If a toy looked amazing on TV, surely it would be amazing in my house. I had not yet learned about camera angles, lighting, editing and the terrible disappointment of a toy that required an adult, two C batteries and the patience of Job.
But one of the stranger things I believed wasn’t something I ever sat down and thought through. It was more of an assumption.
I don’t think I believed teachers lived at school exactly, but I’m not sure I believed they lived fully normal lives either.
Teachers were teachers. They belonged in classrooms. They stood at chalkboards, passed out papers, gave tests, took attendance and somehow knew when you were chewing gum even if your mouth had not moved in three minutes. They were not people with husbands, wives, children, homes, bills, errands, bad days, leaky faucets, family problems, sore backs, grocery lists and cars that made concerning noises.
They were just… teachers.
Seeing a teacher outside of school felt unnatural, like seeing a giraffe in line at Winn-Dixie.
I was married to a teacher for 20 years, so you would think that would have shattered the illusion completely. I saw lesson planning. I saw papers. I saw the exhaustion that followed a long day in the classroom. I saw the life that existed outside the school building.
But somehow, the full reality did not hit me until I became a teacher myself.
That is when I truly understood how much of our real lives teachers keep behind the curtain.
Most teachers insulate their students from their personal lives, and for good reason. Students need us to be human, but they don’t need every detail. They don’t need our bills, our family struggles, our private worries, our personal histories or our exact location at 6:15 on a Tuesday evening.
Especially now.
When I was a kid, finding out where a teacher lived probably required detective work, a bicycle and questionable ethics. Today, students have access to informational tools that can make the world feel a little too small. You cannot imagine how unsettling it is when a student casually announces, “I know where you live.”
That is not a phrase I ever want to hear.
There is no cheerful response to that.
“Well, that’s horrifying. Please don’t.”
Of course, not every out-of-school encounter is creepy. Some are actually sweet.
The first time I remember being recognized by a student outside of school, I was a substitute teacher. I had worked at a nearby school that day, and later that afternoon I went to the grocery store. A student saw me and lit up.
“You were my teacher today!”
That is a nice thing to hear, especially when it is said with a smile. You hope for the smile. You hope it is not said with a sneer, a frown or the tone of someone identifying a suspect in a police lineup.
“There he is, Mom. That’s the man who made us do work.”
There is always a strange little shift when students see teachers outside of school. Their faces almost say, “Wait. You buy milk? You eat food? You wear normal shoes? You exist when the bell rings?”
Yes. We exist.
We go to the grocery store. We pump gas. We sit in traffic. We worry about our families. We pay bills. We get tired. We have doctor appointments. We have broken appliances. We have dogs who need to go outside at the worst possible time. We have mornings when the alarm clock feels like an act of aggression.
And then we walk into a classroom and try to be what our students need us to be.
That may be the part I never understood as a kid.
Teachers are real people who spend a great deal of energy managing how much of their realness students get to see. We joke. We teach. We correct. We encourage. We redirect. We pretend not to be exhausted. We act calm when the room is not calm. We carry things silently that students may never know about, and then we still try to make the lesson work.
As a kid, I did not think much about my teachers’ lives beyond school. Now I know better.
Teachers do have lives outside the classroom. We just hope our students don’t know too much about them.
Enjoyed this? Subscribe and get future reflections, bourbon notes, and assorted nonsense delivered straight to your inbox.
Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
