During today’s professional development sessions, as we sat through presentations on new strategies and evolving standards, I kept thinking about Norman Rockwell’s The Connoisseurs. Three women—grandmother, mother, and child—stand in quiet attention before two paintings: a luminous, classical portrait on the left and a bright cubist abstraction on the right. Each looks with a different kind of understanding, a different readiness to receive.
I see in them the stages of a teaching career. The veteran teacher, steady and discerning, finds comfort in the tried and true. The mid-career teacher, confident but curious, stands between worlds, respectful of what has worked, yet eager for something that feels more relevant, more now. The young teacher, still absorbing it all, doesn’t yet know what to keep or what to question. She’s simply trying to make sense of the gallery before her.
Carl Jung once wrote, “One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.” That line has followed me through the years, a quiet reminder that teaching, at its core, is an act of human connection. It’s easy to forget that truth amid the ever-changing vocabulary of education—data teams, benchmarks, blended learning—but beneath all of it is still the same call: to touch the human soul.
After nineteen years in education, I’m in that quiet transition between the middle and the veteran. Most careers span about thirty years; if that holds true, I’ve entered my final ten-year run. More and more, I find myself the older teacher in the room. When I look around at inservice days, I see faces that remind me of my first years. I see more clearly now: bright, hopeful, occasionally anxious. My thinning hair and graying beard should have warned me sooner, but it’s the company that truly reveals it: many of my peers have moved on, and those who remain are now younger, newer, just beginning to form the habits and philosophies that will define them.
John Dewey once said, “We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.” I feel the truth of that now. The older I get, the less I seek novelty and the more I find meaning in reflection. Experience doesn’t automatically lead to wisdom; it’s reflection that refines it. Maybe that’s what distinguishes the veteran teacher from the mid-career one. It's not simply more years, but a deeper sense of what matters, what endures.
In Rockwell’s painting, the three viewers stand in sequence, as though frozen in time yet bound by the same act of looking. That’s what teaching feels like at this stage. I stand between those who taught me how to teach and those now looking to me for guidance. I am both observer and exhibit. I understand now what the veterans before me must have felt, the weight of experience balanced against the awareness that the gallery keeps changing, the art keeps shifting, and there is always another new way to see.
Picasso once said, “It takes a long time to grow young.” Perhaps that’s the paradox of a teaching life. As we age, the work returns us to curiosity. It returns to the willingness to question, to experiment, to be surprised again. It’s a kind of creative renewal, not unlike the museum visitor who keeps returning to the same paintings and finds them altered, not because they’ve changed, but because we have.
Rockwell, who painted The Connoisseurs during a moment when realism gave way to abstraction, must have felt that same disorientation. He was both participant and witness to transformation. Teaching is no different. We inhabit an ever-evolving landscape of expectations, technologies, and philosophies. Yet the essence remains: a commitment to look closely, to learn continually, to find meaning in what stands before us.
As I sat through today’s sessions, I realized that professional development is less about adopting the newest thing than about refining how we see, how we frame the art of our own teaching. Like the figures in Rockwell’s museum, we are all connoisseurs in our way: leaning in, standing back, comparing notes across time. And somewhere in that quiet gallery of ideas, I recognize myself, not as the young teacher I once was, nor yet the grand veteran, but as one learning, still, how to look with new eyes.
C.S. Lewis once said, “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” At this point in my career, I take that as both challenge and comfort. The story is still unfolding. Longfellow reminds me that “Age is opportunity no less than youth itself, though in another dress.” Perhaps that’s what Rockwell understood. That the art doesn’t end when the brush is set down; it lives on in how others look, learn, and carry it forward.