From My First Year of Teaching

I found this stuck in a book the other day it was dated Tuesday December 19th, 2006.  I was in my first year of teaching at that time.  I was teaching 1st grade in a very low income area.  Little did I know then how very true this was and how much more real this would become only six short years later.

The rest of the world doesn't know that teachers spend their evenings, weekend, and summer vacations grading papers, making bulletin boards, writing lesson plans, and taking classes for recertification...how hard a teacher tries to find the right words to chide, comfort, explain, and inspire...how teachers worry over their students as if they were their own children...how teachers weep when a school erupts into violence because they know it could have been theirs.

- Julia G. Thompson

Unless you are a teacher, you do not know.  You can relate, you can sympathize, but you do not know.