Upworthy · 1 day ago

National Teacher of the Year Has a Brilliant Plan to Recruit More Young teachers: Invite Them

Leon Smith has spent 25 years teaching at the same Pennsylvania high school - a quiet act of devotion in a profession marked by exodus - and now, as the 2026 National Teacher of the Year, his most urgent work is convincing others to follow him in. His approach turns out to be disarmingly simple: just ask, because as Smith puts it, "we just automatically assume that everybody knows what a teacher does, and that is just not true." He also invites skeptics to reconsider the young people already in classrooms, pushing back against a culture that dismisses Gen Z and Gen Alpha as apathetic - when what he actually sees are students "very aware of what's going on" and hungry to be part of making change. There is something quietly clarifying in Smith's story: that one of the most consequential things a person can do is look at a young person and ask whether they've ever considered becoming the kind of adult who shapes other lives. The profession gave Smith everything, including a Black student teacher who walked into his 10th-grade classroom and made a future suddenly feel possible - and now he is trying to pay that moment forward, one invitation at a time.