Reflecting on My Why: What is Yours?

Brittany Hayes
Mar 14
3 min read

Updated: Mar 19

Discovering Teaching

I always thought I’d be a nurse. It just made sense—my grandma worked in healthcare, my mom spent 20 years in emergency nursing, and it felt like the natural next step for me. But when I was 14, my path began to move in a different direction.

I had been assisting in younger dance classes when my mentor, who was pregnant at the time, handed me the reins. No hesitation, no second-guessing—I just stepped in and started teaching. And it felt right. I kept the class moving, managed the room, and let my passion for dance come alive in front of my students. It wasn’t just a little performance—it was me taking the stage, over-performing to draw them in, making sure every student was captivated. That’s when I knew—teaching wasn’t just something I could do, it was something I was meant to do.

From there, I became a dance teacher at 15, working my way from preschool and rec classes to being the lead jazz and contemporary instructor, building curriculum and assessments for the studio. It never felt like a job. When I entered my teaching practicum years later, I felt that same spark—excited to build lessons, perform in front of my students, and mark assignments with my fresh pack of colorful pens.

Moments That Reconnect Me to My Why

As teachers, we know that not every day feels magical. Between meetings, emails, and the never-ending to-do lists, it’s easy to get caught up in the logistics and lose sight of what truly fulfills us.

For me, there are two moments that instantly reconnect me to my why:

The performance. That moment when I’m standing in front of my class, bantering back and forth, seeing their eyes light up because they’re fully engaged. It’s the energy, the rhythm, the way I get to captivate and pull them in.
The connection. When I’m collaborating with another teacher—whether we're building excitement around a new lesson, a new tech feature, or just sharing our love for teaching. Those conversations fuel me.

One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received came from a student sitting next to me on a bus during a field trip. She turned to me and said, “You know when you get to stare out the window during a lesson? You don’t let us do that. You make it impossible to do anything but learn from you.”

That’s it. That’s the why.

What Pulls Me Away

But let’s be real—not every moment in teaching feels this clear.

For me, the hardest part is handling strongly worded emails or miscommunications with parents. It’s easy to let them weigh on me, to feel like I need to defend my choices, or to question if I handled something the right way. But over time, I’ve learned an important lesson:

Those words are not a Google review of my teaching.

I can’t control the version of events that gets told at home. I can’t control what others choose to believe. What I can control is how I show up in my classroom every day. When the outside noise gets too loud, I know I need to step back into that space where it’s just me and my students—the place where my why is strongest.