That camping trip your family still talks about? Science says it’s worth more than any toy under the tree.
Greg Kata is used to saying the things every teacher is thinking.
The 45-year-old teaching artist, acting coach and content creator is unapologetically himself on social media — and it’s a big reason why he has accumulated more than 2.7 million followers on TikTok.
But he’s noticing a trend with the kids he teaches. And it’s breaking his heart.
“We’ve gotta talk about a part of teaching no one warns you about. Nobody puts this in the brochure,” he said at the beginning of a TikTok video, posted on Jan. 9.
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Kata, who regularly encourages his followers to “find your joy,” went on to describe what he calls ‘grieving the sparkle.’
“Here’s the thing. When you teach kindergarten through seventh grade, you don’t just teach kids. You watch them grow up in real time,” he explained.
“In kindergarten, these kids come in fully-cooked. They are feral. They are confident. They are wearing three socks, one cowboy hat, a tiara and emotional support glitter,” he continued.
It’s the type of confidence that has Kata wanting to follow his students into battle.
“They are so unapologetically themselves, it is intoxicating,” he said.
“They are deliciously weird. The good weird. The kind of weird where you’re like, ‘I don’t know what planet you are from, but I am considering a timeshare,’” he continued.
“And the best part: they are not embarrassed. They don’t flinch. They don’t ask if it’s okay. They just are,” he added.
Kata reveals the ‘subtle’ shift that breaks his heart
As kids enter middle school, teachers like Kata start to notice a “subtle” shift in their students’ behavior.
“Quieter voice, a joke they don’t finish, a hand that used to shoot straight up suddenly hovers and then drops. They start scanning the room before they speak. They test the temperature,” he explains.
Kata describes that shift as the “part that guts you.”
“No one tells you how heartbreaking it is to watch kids learn to edit themselves,” he says. “To sand down their edges. To tuck away the thing that made them them because suddenly it doesn’t fit the group chat aesthetic.”
“And the worst part is: I don’t know if we can stop it,” Kata continued.
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Teachers can do their best to encourage uniqueness and “say all the right things,” but Kata warns that the “world is loud” and “peer pressure is ruthless.”
He describes middle school as an “unpaid internship in insecurity.”
“The world does not need more perfectly blended beige humans. It needs these kids. The oddballs. The rule-benders. The ones who make you tilt your head and say, ‘I never thought of it like that,’” he added.
“Those kids — they’re not meant to fit the mold. They are meant to break it. History does not remember the kids that played it safe. It remembers the weird ones who couldn’t help themselves,” he continued.
Kata explains why it ‘sucks so much as a teacher’
For someone who has taught students for over 20 years, Kata knows the shift when he sees it.
“That’s why it sucks so much as a teacher because when you’ve taught long enough, you totally can see it coming. You recognize the sparkle before it flickers,” he said in the video.
“You can see who they are before the world tries to tell them who they should be,” he added.
According to Kata, teachers can only hope that “something will crack them back open” at some point.
But it doesn’t always happen.
“I don’t know who told them different, but these kids need to know that they are never too much. They are exactly enough,” he exclaimed.
“So, stop telling kids who to be because this phone that you’re watching this video on was definitely not invented by somebody beige. Find your joy,” he concluded.
Kata not only owns his own acting and voice studio for two decades, but has also been a teaching artist with organizations such as Camp Broadway and Bravo TV.
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He has made guest appearances on “General Hospital” and several Broadway productions and played the original role of Boots the Monkey in “Dora the Explorer LIVE.”
