Some Days....

I love my job. Really. I am that much of a teacher nerd. Although, I would venture to guess that most teachers get into teaching for two reasons. One: because they absolutely love teaching. They are teaching maniacs. Freaks, if you will. The other, less subtle, reason. Summers "off".

Probably not so much for the million dollar contract and endorsement kick backs, yeah?

Back to me being a nerd. There are days when I leave my classroom, or I am standing at the whiteboard writing something, or I am thinking about how a lesson went and I think:

"I seriously get paid to do this for a living."

It happens a lot during the first couple weeks of school for a variety of reasons:

ONE: I forget over the summer all the small annoyances associated with this job (Every job has them). TWO: I get to know a bunch of new students and make cool connections with them; we get to know each other as people, not as "teacher" and "student". This is one of my favorite parts of teaching....

--seeing the shy kid raise his hand and commenting on it later to him how it was a really well spoken idea

--the Body Snatched Students start sleeping in and my Real Students start showing their personalities and testing me to see how much of their true selves they can be in my class.

THIRDLY: I sometimes feel like I am "play acting". Not in the sense that I am faking it, just that I feel like it is just so much fun to be a teacher, that it can't be real. That it can't really be what I "am". FOUR: I still feel fresh, not burned out as many of us our right before winter break or.......the middle of May when everyone is sick of everyone else and chomping at the bit for summer. I have a ton of energy and big plans for the year.

Don't get me wrong, I blow no smoke, my name isn't Susie Sunshine, I do not skip to my classroom at 7:30 every morning, and I don't put smiley faces on papers when I correct them. Inevitably, there is a yin and yang. Every up has its down. Any other relevant cliche. Inevitably, of course, there are days where there was maybe just ONE too many dramatic sighs, eyerolls or tooth suck. Those are the days where I might tend to think, just for a brief moment: "I don't get paid enough for this s***...."