Image: Trey Ratcliff
Aspiration is a great word to bear in mind when it comes to teaching.
The first and most obvious application refers to basically wanting to succeed at what you do. Personally I think it is important to see this in the plural sense; the aspirations you have for yourself as a teacher are more often than not bound up in the aspirations you have for your learners, and of course the aspirations they have for themselves.
Well, I think they should be.
If it's more about you and less about your learners and the overall learning space, you've probably slipped along the synonym scale (and across parts of speech) to land somewhere around the word ambitious.
Why would I prefer a word like aspiration over ambition, then?
Aspiration also refers to breathing (as a general action) but also to the idea of releasing a breath. Aspiration is therefore a fundamental part of living; we might even interpret breathing and individual breaths as essential criteria for the success involved in just being...
Likewise, without breath, speech and talk are (in most instances) impossible.
I've occasionally worked with teachers who thought they were talking, but were pretty much just making inarticulate vowel sounds deep in their throats that only they could really interpret. Okay, so maybe I've been one of them myself at various times in my teaching career...and perhaps the talk ('career'?) has sometimes slipped more into the ambitious stable than the aspiration landscape.
In any case, I think it's vitally important to find and give breath to your teaching/learning aspirations.
Give them life... and articulation.