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You can tell a lot about a teacher by the part they leave out and Jesse Fawess doesn’t hide the messy parts. We start with the honest origin story: a Babylon kid pulled toward art, architecture, and surf culture who tries college, bails after three days, comes home, pays rent, and has to figure out what adulthood looks like without a script. Somewhere in that uncertainty, teaching keeps resurfacing, not as a “dream job” slogan, but as the one place he feels naturally good at connecting with kids.

We talk about the real inflection points that shape a teaching career: the child psychology program that puts him with preschoolers, the mentor who basically calls his future, and the community college reset that turns drifting into a plan. From student teaching in Babylon to getting hired in West Islip in 1997, Jesse shares what it felt like to walk into a building, learn the culture fast, and eventually find his stride in sixth grade team teaching. Along the way, we get into what great teams actually do for students and why “legacy” in education is often just years of consistent care.

Then we go wider: classroom technology before it was normal, Macs and iMovie as creative fuel, and why kids now experience tech like furniture, it’s just there. We also get candid about how parenting and expectations have changed, why discipline looks different, and how we try to reach kids without turning everything into punishment. If you care about teaching, classroom management, education trends, or what schools feel like from the inside, you’ll find a lot to argue with and a lot to nod at. Subscribe, share this with a teacher who will have opinions, and leave a review with the biggest change you’ve seen in schools.