A Month of Gratitude #21

I am grateful for teachers. I have had many, many wonderful ones and really hardly any not so wonderful ones. I don't know when, I don't know how, but at some point between the time I graduated from high school and the time I finished my own first year of teaching, teachers became the bad guys. They get paid too much, their health insurance is too good, they only work six hours a day, they have three months off in the summer, they have too many days off during the school year, blah blah blah. Well, let me tell you what. As someone who actually did teach school for fifteen years, let me tell you, being a teacher is a difficult, isolating, mostly thankless job. And the better you are at it, the harder it is. A teacher is not just working when she/he is with students. There is the planning, the correcting and grading (oh my gosh, the correcting) and, in my case, the shopping. Anyone wonder why I'm not a teacher anymore? I wish that anyone who criticizes teachers on a wholesale basis had to do the job for a week. The real job.

This reminds me of something funny (true/funny) that I read in Gourmet magazine back when I was a teacher. The quote was, "I used to be a middle school music teacher, which had nothing to do with either teaching or music." Any teacher can relate. Especially those wonderful souls who do teach middle school.

Not only am I grateful for the teachers I had, I am also grateful to the excellent teachers who taught my daughter. I was, with very few exceptions, very impressed with those who taught her. Thank you!!!