Almost two months since my last post.  I know.  Bad blogger, but I have an excuse.  I got a job.  A hard job.  And the blogging had to be put aside until I found my footing.  Let me explain.

The last time I was required to show up for work five days a week was September, 2006.  As a result, I have been blind sided, chewed up, spit out, wrung out, and manhandled by a regular work schedule.  And I’m so much happier.

When hired as a teacher at a private school here in Vitoria, the moment called for champagne, but I have to make a rather embarrassing confession.  While I believed teaching was a better job than no job at all, I deep down thought it was beneath my potential.  I truly believed teaching was a profession people joined who didn’t think they could make it in more competitive fields.  I had a truly brilliant roommate in college who was passionate about teaching and education, but I didn’t base my assessment of the field on her.  Rather, in my facebook colored perception of reality, I based my assessment on all the mediocre students I had gone to high school with who are now, according to their profiles, teachers.  If someone who barely passed biology could go on to be a science teacher how hard can the job be?

When I get home at night my feet are throbbing. My voice is worn out.  My patience is gone.  I don’t have energy to care about what’s for dinner let alone remain standing long enough to make it.  I drift listlessly around my apartment from 9:30 to 10 because I just can’t go to bed before 10 but I can’t think hard enough to give myself any direction.  I’m asleep by 10:30.

It’s pretty hard.

I now know the people in the US currently complaining about cushy teacher salaries have never really considered what teaching entails.  There’s pretty much a consensus among people who have kids that raising them is hard.  Kids don’t pay attention. They don’t think.  They lack knowledge, motor skills, and basic hygiene often into adulthood.  Ideally parents come as a two person team but often one parent ends up in charge of the kids.  Again, we agree that one parent with two or three kids, “that’s a tough job.”  Teachers have 20 kids, all to themselves, for 180 days a year.

Think about handling a herd of those adorable, self-involved, cognitively underdeveloped munchkins.  Now think about having them all day, every day.  Did I mention you have to do more than just keep them from gluing their hair together or cracking their head open as they lean back in their chair? No, preventing physical injury is not enough.  You must also keep their attention and help them learn something they didn’t know before coming to you.  You must stimulate their creativity and logical reasoning.  You are not allowed to send the slow ones, or the obnoxious ones, or the slightly smelly ones off into a corner.  You must work with all of them.

To sum up, a teacher must take a group of kids, keep them safe, awake, focused and then improve them.  A teacher must send the kids home as better, more knowledgeable human beings every day or she is not doing her job.  Teaching requires creativity, improvisation, patience, public speaking, stamina, organization, diplomacy, all in addition to knowledge of the subject being taught.

Any teacher making less than a six figure salary is underpaid.

I am underpaid. But happy.  I was wrong about teaching.  It is an immensely rewarding challenge.  One I’m thoroughly enjoying.  Not that I would say no to a six figure salary.