by <Name Withheld>

The speaker is a native Floridian and senior at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She is an English and History major with aspiration of becoming an attorney, specializing in Education Law.

I grabbed another Lysol wipe, to wipe down the second cluster of tables. The teacher who I had been assigned to, Ms. Baker, had just left to walk the some of the first graders to the car-pickup spot. I had been coming to her classroom once a week in the afternoon to help her students with their math and word recognition skills.

On this particular day though, she did not have her usual stack of sticky papers for me to grade, so I decided to make myself useful elsewhere. I thought about what would please her, and what would make the next day a more enjoyable time for her and her students. So, I decided to tidy up the classroom. I borrowed a broom and dustpan from one of the teachers next door and swept the floor filled with broken crayons, scraps of paper, and a student’s homework assignment. After sweeping the floors, I moved on to clean the desks, trying to disinfect the tabletops where kids would sneeze, paying particular attention to the marker drawings on the surface.

I had just gotten to the next group of tables when one of the first graders spoke to me. She was the only student left in the room. She was waiting to be notified that her bus had arrived to the school.

She was sitting at her desk, which was pushed off to the farthest corners of the room, away from all other desks, not in a group, in an isolated corner, facing the wall. I hadn’t had the chance to work with her for entire time that I had been serving there as a tutor.

“Do you work here?” she asked. “No” I replied. I assumed she was asking me if I worked as a teacher or held if I held a staff position at the school full-time. “Then what do you do that people like?” she asked. I laughed a little to myself because of the way she equated “work” with “pleasing people.” I laughed because I thought that it was a cute thing that an adult, perhaps her parents, told her about what work was—an innocent explanation as to what “having a job” really means.

But who really seeks out a job with the intentions of pleasing people? Who chooses a career path based on what people want? I only know people who work to survive, make money, pay bills, or more commonly, do what pleases them. After all, it was wise man who once said, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.”

I continued cleaning, but I thought back to the reason why I decided to tidy up the classroom in the first place, why I decided to tutor low-income students—because I wanted to please Ms. Baker. I wanted to please the students, their parents, the school, the teachers.  I wasn’t there to clean nor did Ms. Baker tell me to. I simply cleaned because I knew she would appreciate it. I enjoy doing things that people will like. But I think this is generally thought of as simply service work or volunteering, not actual work. I used to think that work takes into no account of the feelings of others. Ask anyone what they do for a living, and I’m pretty sure no one will begin by telling you how so many people like what they do.

But I am determined to work with people in mind. To one day explain to strangers that what I do for a living are things people like. What I do for a living is pleasing to others.