{She Said} My Calling

During a week where teachers are being appreciated, I give you why I appreciate being a teacher... I will start by saying this: I believe every true teacher is made to work with a certain grade level (this gets a bit fuzzy at the high school level). While most people say something to the effect of “Bless your heart,” when I tell them I teach 7th grade, I feel blessed to get to do this.

• I get to hang out with groups of kids all day and those groups rotate every 45 minutes so just when I am getting sick of certain individuals, they leave.
• I can tell my customers to “stop acting like fools” and that is acceptable
• Things, like giant stuffed armadillos, populate my desk

• I am organized. This automatically makes me a leader in my field.
• 7th graders are “with it” enough to get my jokes and sarcasm, but not cocky enough to give it back
• I sit around all day thinking of ways to make things more fun
• Kids bring me things… like rubber ducks

• I periodically get opportunities to dress like a goofball
• My office is bigger than yours
• I am sometimes privy to interesting conversations like “we should get all the good people out of Afghanistan and then send a plane with an orange sign and black lettering saying ‘goodbye’ and then level the place… that would fix things” and “my pet rock died last night so I was up late having a service for it”
• Solutions that are simple to me are HUGE to 7th graders so I am a hero to someone daily.
• I get to be some students’ favorite. I am pretty sure I wasn’t ever anyone’s favorite Marketing Liaison.
• Drama in the classroom actually improves my students performance. So I often get to ACT like a goofball all day (in a cool kind of way, of course).
• Breaks: Thanksgiving, Winter, Spring, and Summer.
• I get to make up rules like “every student will thank me for teaching him or her at the end of each class.”