validation

Although surrounded by 120 stinky teenagers all day, I've come to realize that teaching is a fairly solitary job. Solitary, I guess, in the sense that I rarely have interactions with adults during the day.

While I won't pretend to know what my office-working friends do all day (my exposure so such things is limited to a) The Office b) Office Space and c) the once a year journey to my father's work for Take Your Daughter to Work Day, the latter restoring my hope in office job, simply for the fact that my dad worked in a skyscraper in downtown and we ate lunch at a swanky restaurant, which I realize was not his daily ritual), I would imagine that their adult interaction ratio is much grater than mine. In fact, I would wager a guess that they don't speak to anyone under the age of 18 all day, and I speak to very few. I digress.

We all know that teaching is a thank-less job, unless you're one of those rare souls to influences someone enough to have them write you a letter or come and visit you years after you graduated to thank them for their efforts. And usually these thank-yous don't come in the form of "thank you for really clearing up the difference between a past participle and the past simple" but a "thank you for making me be a better person" kind of way. And really, as of late, teachers have been particularly upset, due largely to the projected 300,000 teacher jobs being cut in our nation. For the work we do, we are severely under paid, under appreciated, and over worked. And usually the teachers belting this loudly from the rooftops are the crappity teachers who should be the ones losing their jobs, not the young, inspired, hardworking teachers who are losing theirs. But this isn't a story about that.

While my department chair is on maternity leave for the remainder of the year, a young fellow has become her long-term sub. The Doctor, as we like to call him is 23 and has no aspirations of being a high school English teacher, although his undergrad degree is in English. No, The Doctor will be attending a highly ranked university next fall to get his Masters and then PhD in English, and will one day profess to thousands of students who spends zillions of dollars at universities about Chaucer and Beckett and Milton. Thrilling.

I'm pretty sure that The Doctor thinks that high school English teachers, and particularly the female variety are frivolous. That all we do all day is color or draw or watch movies or sing Kumbaya (and why does kumbaya always get the bad wrap??). But we don't. It takes a lot of time to come up with inspiring and educational lessons that not only teach the kids the state standards (which constantly loom over our heads) but that also entertain them (because your students have grown up with xbox, dvr and ipods). And finally, I feel like The Doctor realizes that we I do is hard, and it's not always rewarded, but it is, however, rewarding. And through The Doctors' enlightenment, I hope that somewhere else in the world, some substitute who thought the same things realizes his or her mistake.

My other validation came this week from two coworkers who work with a few of my students and complemented me on some activities and assignments I had done this week. It's always nice to be recognized by coworkers as having done something worthwhile and inspiring.

And lastly, during and conversation today with my least-favorite class, they confessed that they actually like me. While I'm not at school to make friends, and don't keep myself up at night wondering if they do actually like me, it's nice to know that they do. Even when I asked them to clarify (because certainly, they only like me because I'm an easy teacher or a pushover or some such thing) they said that no, they liked me because I explained things well and because they learned stuff from me.

Thank heavens for validation.