- Hard. No lie. It is one of the hardest things I've ever done.
- The best job in the entire world. Even though it is hard, it is the best job in the entire world.
- Continually learning, exploring, and discovering and loving it.
- Loving children and celebrating their successes with them.
- Loving children, and thus, crying over their struggles, inattentiveness, apathy, disappointments, challenges and trials. And then praying for them.
- Exhausting physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially.
- Means always talking about your job: your curriculum and district's policies (both the good and the bad), subject content, and students (good, bad, funny).
- Using your teacher voice on your spouse, relatives, and friends.
- Wanting to read but not having time because you are grading or prepping literature lessons (ironic, no?).
- Eating a lot of feel-good food (Big Gulps, Sonic drinks, Diet Coke--whatever your fancy and chocolate--a lot of chocolate.)
- Learning, using, forgetting, losing, repenting, and praying for patience.
- Rewarding to see the lightbulb go off over your students' heads.
- Not a 40 hour a week job. Nor does it mean having summers off. Or weekends.
- Not babysitting.
- (I believe) A calling from God. It's like the Marine Corps motto, "The few. The proud." Many may want to be teachers, but only a few were made and meant to be teachers.
- All I ever wanted to do. It's my dream job.
- Getting up early in the morning and going to bed early (hopefully...at least I try).
- Putting others before you.
- Gaining friends of all ages.
- Trying to find the balance between mentor, coach, parental-figure, friend, confidant, boss, tutor.
- Loving to read others' writings and being inspired by pre-teens and teenagers almost every day. Seriously. Kids are smart and can pick things up in literature that you never have!
- Social. Parents, coworkers, students. There is always someone to talk to!
- Time consuming.
- Gets easier in some ways as you continue, but also gets harder in other ways.
- Almost like going through puberty all over again.
- An excellent way to use your imagination and creativity.
- Remembering to smile and always be positive.
- Constantly reminding young teenagers to put their names on their paper.
- An excuse to talk about geeky things like Marvel Comic movies, videogames, Comicon, etc.
- Constantly reminding young teenagers to put their names on their paper.
- An excuse to talk about geeky things like Marvel Comic movies, videogames, Comicon, etc.
- Is what I am meant to be.

:) What a blessing that you can honestly believe and say that your career is exactly where you are meant to be!
ReplyDeleteAll of those statements are SO true. It is such a difficult but rewarding job!
ReplyDelete