Teaching is truly odd

Life is so funny... when you get the time to stop and think about it. I'm sitting on my couch with my hubby, watching "Exploring the West" (quite a worthwhile show if you ever get the chance) and perusing the blogs of my students. While I am in a complete estate of calm, the perusal of their blogs comes at a price- a realization of just how far I have to push my kids to get by the end of the year. And they are such a diverse class of 7th and 8th graders, each student offering something completely unique to his/herself the rest of the class and me. Much of that diversity comes in the form of important concepts and ideas that they lack! Each one of these has not fully taken in the gift that is their education, but the parts of the package that have been lost are truly different from child to child. And to think that I doubted coming back this year. Yes there are times when this job is difficult, no, no, AGONIZING; times when I realize just how underpaid I am and how impossible this job really is; times that I lose all hope in my own ability to stay calm and sane.

But there are also those other times, times like right before this when I was reviewing my students' blogs; times when I know that I get to help influence the thinking of children that are far brighter than they know they are, far brighter than they wish to be; there are those times when I realize that my attitude towards teaching becomes their attitude towards learning, and class becomes a ship that sails through oceans of the most beautiful, most carefully chosen diction that the literary world has every seen; there are those times when they try their hardest to contradict my very being and I can see that spark beginning to ignite within them the flame that, if stoked correctly, will power them to be... whatever they want to be. But the most beautiful part of my job is that everyday is a day spent doing exactly what I love to do.