A Teacher Is A Terrible Thing To Waste

I believe teachers are saints on earth. There are few people I hold in this high a regard. My mom tops the list, being the sweetest person in the world because she's married to my dad AND she doesn't have to be drunk or stoned to stay that way. Firefighters, police officers, doctors, soldiers.....they're obviously all right up there, too. But when I really think of what a saint would be like, it has to be a teacher. It doesn't matter what they teach, how long they've been teaching, or even if they're good teachers, although I won't let Bad Teacher Cameron Diaz in that category because I don't think she's pretty or funny. I'm not insisting all teachers should be attractive or have a good sense of humor, but actors portraying teachers absolutely should.

My oldest friend, Miss Pince, is a grade school teacher. I understand why she is. She is funny and sunny and silly and lovable. She's good with all people, be they adults or be they brats. Even knowing the reserve of patience she has, I still am baffled at her ability to continue to be....happy. Every single day, her job consists of runny noses, stinky outside smelling kids, ugly kids (shudder), group bathroom trips, school cafeteria food, homework, and most of all, trying to TEACH things to little kids. The quickest way to realize how poor of a guide you are is to try to teach a child something, ANYTHING. As each one of my kids got to school, I tried to teach them to read. Each time I ended up pulling my hair out and yelling, "The word is FIRST! First, first, first! You just read it three times on this same page! Why aren't you reading it right?" I'm amazed my kids even CAN read at this point with all the early childhood trauma they endured.

Which is another reason teachers are so amazing. They not only have to deal with kids (and sometimes really, really ugly and smelly ones) but they have to deal with their equally ugly (and I'm sure sometimes also really smelly) parents. Parent calls. Parent emails. Parent conferences. Parent complaints. Parent pickup. Then there are the poor middle school teachers who have to deal with fights, hormones, puberty, snottiness, anger, crying, breakups, disruptiveness, hatred, criticism, apathy, cell phones, texting, and youtube. Now take all that and add driving and sex to that pot of insanity, and you have the equally horrible day of a high school teacher.

Sadly, they also have to deal with parents like me, who are neither smelly nor ugly, but even worse: Parents who have to be reminded to parent their children. I try very, very hard, but between the newsletters and the auto-generated emails (and by the way, those could be a bit more helpful; all I get is "your child has a project due tomorrow," with no clue which kid it's for or even which school it's from, and no one ever seems willing to admit to even HAVING a project), with three kids in three different schools, I'm juggling bus numbers, routes, and pickup/dropoff times. I juggle lunch menus and payments and balances and do we have any more juice boxes, never mind just take a Coke, what do you mean you can't take a Coke, fine, just take this bottle of sparkling flavored water, hopefully no one thinks you're whipping up martinis at lunch, take extra cookies since I forgot to buy bread. I try to keep up with hundreds of scraps of paper about field trips, book fairs, fundraisers, tryouts, fees due, days off, half days, conference days. I get the automated calls that start out, "This is the XXX School calling about...." as I try to guess which of the three's name will follow. Then I have to hope it's a reminder about an upcoming event and not the dreaded "your son didn't attend class today." (Why can't they save me the hassle and just learn to submit a fake phone number to their school like I did at their age???)

My point isn't that it's hard to be a mom. It is. My point is that for all of those things I do every day x3, the teachers have to do it every single day x30. Or more if they're teaching multiple classes. It's a hard, hard world out there, and you really can't fault the teachers who burn out and just become teaching zombies. Even with zombie teachers, I'm glad it's someone else and not me. But somehow there are still enough really, really good ones to make sure this generation doesn't leave the system quite as dumb as they started. So we should stop being angry about expensive supply lists and book orders and classroom fees, and appreciate the person who is behind every single one of those scraps of paper I try to keep up with. Because that means someone is trying to keep up with my kids, which is something I can rarely even do myself, and believe me, I ain't no saint.