I don't know if this is true of all professions but I am so struck by the clash between reality and theory in the teaching world.  Ideally, all of our kids are offered this great education with the help of hundreds of adults all doing a different job to meet the needs of each student on an individual basis.  In reality, there are hundreds of adults but they are often on different pages or all trying to complete a different goal for each student.  For example, as a teacher I'm working to give 25ish kids the best education I can, as often and as soon as I can, so I use administrators and counselors for individual support.  Their job is to create a better situation for individual students- no matter how long or how hard they have to work.  What they don't realize is that the longer they take helping each individual student succeed (even the ones who are determined to "unsucceed" as one of my kids said) the more my 25 students as a whole are struggling because of one or two others.  It all boils down to a lot of different people all trying to achieve somewhat similar goals but all needing to answer to someone higher up with even slightly different goals.  As much as everyone says its about the students, it's easy to forget when you're in the middle of it.  Not to mention that each teacher has a department head who has a curriculum advisor and each student has an advisor who has a dean.

done venting

I'm loving my job and finally getting the hang of it (kind of).  That entails:

-getting copies done more than one day in advance

-not forgetting my water bottle and/or plans and/or seating chart in one of my four rooms

-remembering to check my mailbox and email more than once a day

-remembering 80% of my 170some student names

-learning to laugh when i feel like crying

-mastering "the look"

-memorizing all of the ridiculous acronyms teachers have for EVERYTHING

-being able to leave work at 5 feeling like i'm somewhat aware of what will be happening the following day

-building some really awesome relationships with some incredible kids, most of whom have no idea how incredible they are!

and on that happy ending... i'm out!